


Forgetting is so long

by ladyfnick



Category: Original Work
Genre: Amnesia, M/M, Magic-Users, Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2017-06-08
Packaged: 2018-07-22 07:21:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 74,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7425406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyfnick/pseuds/ladyfnick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amnesia.<br/>Ugh. Been there, done that a thousand times, right?<br/>But let me tell you, there is nothing quite like waking up covered in blood, wearing next to no clothing and clutching a broken cell phone.</p><p>Rating for language and non-graphic violence.<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

As it turned out, I was actually a pretty boring person. Or at least, that’s what my apartment told me. It wasn’t like I could speak from experience.

It’s such an overused trope. Just thinking the word makes me cringe.

“Oh no, Doctor I’ve lost my memories, whatever shall I do?” Cries the busty patient to Dr. Gorgeous, prompting eyerolls from every person on the planet because _that’s not how that works._ Except when it does.

Amnesia.

Ugh. Been there, done that a thousand times, right?

But let me tell you, there is nothing quite like waking up covered in blood, wearing next to no clothing and clutching a broken cell phone. The guy who found me probably didn’t have a very fun time either. Passing out and waking up in an unfamiliar hospital takes a close second in the super fun life experiences competition, though.

“The brain is a tricky thing, it’s possible you may remember some things spontaneously or following a trigger, but it could be that you never remember anything,” the very sympathetic doctor had told me right before I’d been discharged from the hospital. He’d been a nice enough guy, even his antlers had looked apologetic. That hadn’t changed the part where he had told me I was basically screwed and there wasn’t much I could do about it.

So here I was, in what was my apparently spectacularly boring apartment.

There were half open boxes all over the place, so it could have been that I’d only just moved. Or I was a serious slob who couldn’t be bothered to unpack.

Judging by their contents though, I was probably a recent arrival who also had really boring, milquetoast taste.

A recent, boring arrival who had no friends.

Despite being a Nokia brick, the phone I’d been found with was too damaged for it to be repaired, and its adventure in the river had ruined any chance of salvaging its SIM chip and any information that would have been on it.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what the fuck I’d been up to, to break a Nokia phone that badly. It had almost looked like there had been _scorch_ marks on the back of it, the plastic warped like it had partially melted and then hardened again.

Several nurses had been kind enough to run my name through every online database they could find, but while my name had generated a few hits, none of them had been in reference to me specifically. I suppose that was the consequence of having such a generic, average name. Someone really should have told my parents to give me a more unique name in the event of me losing my memories in a city where it seemed like no one knew me.

So I was a technophobic, boring loser without any friends with a boring name, a boring apartment and not much else.

Luckily in my pocket I’d had a wallet with my driver’s license, a bus pass, a debit card and a coupon for a waffle house, so I’d been able to find out where I lived (I must have updated my license right after moving, seems I was the fussy, organized type) and I’d be able to get free hash browns next time I got waffles, provided I could find wherever _Flo’s Spot_ was.

Opal, one of my nurses, had been kind enough to set up a facebook page for me, so theoretically someone I knew might find me eventually. Though, after digging around in my half dozen open boxes, it seemed I didn’t even own a computer.

That would have to change. Though I guessed I’d probably first need to find out how much money I even had. Did I even have a job? They’d be in for a surprise if I was supposed to have come into work in the last two weeks. At this point, I would have welcomed an angry employer hammering on my door if it meant finding a connection to my past.

I didn’t appear to own much of anything, it seemed. The small three room apartment still felt practically spacious due to the lack of furnishings, despite how narrow the rooms were.

In my sparse bedroom I had a spindly single bed, a cheap dresser and a cracked mirror. I rummaged through the dresser without much hope. I was wearing donated clothing from the hospital, and they were ill-fitting. What I owned wasn’t much of an improvement.

I had three pairs of pants; which included a pair of thin sweatpants, and two pairs of worn jeans, both grey, one with a small hole in the knee. The next drawer yielded some really tragic, threadbare underwear any sensible person would have thrown out and replaced long ago. The final drawer was hard to open and I had to press my feet the edges of the dresser while I yanked backwards to pry it open. The contents weren’t much of a prize: a single gray hoodie, four boring button down shirts, all white, and a blue t-shirt.

It was only marginally better than what I had on, but the pants would at least not be too short like the donated ones I had on were. It was kind of hilarious how much of my ankle were showing in them. I chose the t-shirt and the jeans without the hole in them. If I wasn’t completely broke I’d definitely have to go shopping.

It seemed being an amnesiac was only improving my fashion sense. It was a pretty shitty trade-off, in my opinion.

The bathroom was a tiny room off of the bedroom. There, I found cheap soap, a dull razor and bargain-bin shampoo, no conditioner. That seemed kinda odd to me.

My hair was kind of ridiculous. It was a silvery blond and tumbled down to my hips, nearly perfectly straight. What kind of guy went to the effort of keeping his hair so long but didn’t look after it at all? When I’d been found it had been bound in a tight bun, but I’d taken to leaving it down since it was much more comfortable, even if it got in the way a lot.

Somehow, I got the impression that pre-amnesia me would have been rather irritated by this. Given how pissed off I was at pre-amnesia me for getting me into this situation, I got a petty thrill out of it.

There weren’t any towels in the bathroom, so I just changed clothes rather than also bathe. I wasn’t too badly in need of a shower anyways, since I’d had one the day before my release from the hospital.

Putting the t-shirt on was rather difficult, as it tugged on the line of stitches on the left side of my ribs. It probably would have been smarter to wear one of the button down shirts, but I didn’t think of that until halfway through the struggle and it was too much hassle to give up by that point.

The pants, much to my relief, fit much better. I was pretty tall and kind of skinny, and the pants I’d been given at the hospital had been too short in the legs and too wide for my hips.

The being skinny thing was probably my own fault, if the kitchen was anything to go by. It was next to bare, with only a handful of spices, a miniscule amount of dry rice in a Ziploc bag and two lonely carrots.

I surveyed the pitiful lot with a critical eye.

On the one hand, the doctor had said going through my belongings would help me remember. On the other the apartment and its contents were seriously depressing.  It was also kind of creepy. It felt like I was poking through a stranger’s things. Or a dead person’s. Either way it felt like I didn’t belong and like someone was going to find me and I’d be in trouble.

“Oh screw all of this,” I said and grabbed my keys and wallet from where I’d tossed them on the kitchen table and left.

Outside, I felt a lot better, even if it was raining a little.

For all that it was seriously rundown on the inside, the apartment was in a nice enough location, with plenty of shops and things with and loads of normal people buzzing by.

I stopped the first kind looking middle-aged lady I saw.

“Excuse me do you know where I can find a... uh,” I pulled out my debit card and looked at the logo, “B&G Banks?”

The lady raised an eyebrow at me like I’d asked a stupid question. For all I knew of this city, maybe I had.

“I just moved here,” I added with the most innocently naive expression I could muster.

Apparently appeased, the woman said, “There’s one three blocks that way, on Larch Street.”

Before I could thank her, she nodded politely and kept walking. As she said, I found the bank three blocks away on a much busier street.

I realized why she’d thought it was a stupid question; the bank was enormous and unmistakable. Even a complete moron would have noticed and remembered its general location.

Inside, I froze. There was a small flaw in my plan; how was I going to get access to my money? I couldn’t remember what my PIN number was. I doubted there was an “I have amnesia, I swear I didn’t steal this card” button.

“Are you in line?” a voice asked from behind me.

I turned around to see an impatient looking woman with impressive lipstick behind me. She inclined her head towards an open ATM. All three of her eyes were looking at me in obvious irritation.

“Ah, yeah, sorry, I zoned out there,” I said and approached the machine without really meaning to.

Well, I supposed I could just guess.

I shoved the card in and then, without thinking, tapped in 6745. The screen changed and displayed the usual option menu.

I stared down at my hand. I hadn’t meant to do that. I hadn’t even thought of a number, my hand had just gone through the motions like it was a habit. Which, I supposed it probably was. Thank you, muscle memory!

When I’d been in the hospital, I’d found out that I could still do thing despite not remembering when I’d learned them; not only could I read and write, but once while I’d been bored listening to my doctors discuss my odd case in exceptionally doctorly words I’d folded an elaborate paper flower without meaning to.

I checked my account balance first, expecting not a whole lot to be in it, given what the sum of my worldly possessions had been.

I- that was a lot of money.

I squinted at the screen, wondering if the decimal point was in the right spot. Even I, someone with only a fortnight’s worth of memories, knew that was an obscene amount of money.

Why the hell was I living in such a tiny apartment with so few belongings when I could apparently afford to buy my own country?

After another moment of goggling at the screen, I only took out a hundred dollars and shoved it into my wallet. Given my previous luck, I’d probably get mugged if I carried more.

The first stop I made was at the first cell phone store I came across.

I picked out another brick phone, figuring it would be better to be prepared and not need a near indestructible phone.

“That one comes in other colours,” the salesman told me when I approached him to sign up for a phone plan.

I glanced down at the phone. It was electric pink and a little sparkly. Pre-amnesia me probably wouldn’t have liked it since it wasn’t grey or complete shit. I kind of liked it. Mostly on its own merits. Mostly. I had amnesia, I was allowed to be as petty as I wanted towards pre-amnesia me; it was that jackass’s fault I was in this situation.

“This is fine,” I replied. The guy raised his eyebrow at me but shrugged.

“What kind of phone plan are you looking for? If you sign up for our premium plan, you get five contacts with unlimited texting.

“That’s not necessary,” I said with a wry smile. “I just want the basic thing, whatever I can set up the fastest.”

Half an hour later I was the proud owner of a bright pink phone and a three year phone contract. I’d probably not done a good job of bargaining for the best deal, but with the mounds of cash in my bank account, that didn’t really seem necessary.

I dialed Opal’s number that she’d written down on a post-it note for me the day before.

“Hi, it’s me. I have a phone again,” I said. I wouldn’t call Opal a friend, but she’d been sympathetic to my current predicament, and had given me her number, instructing me to stay in contact. It was a bit comforting to know that I’d have at least one contact on my new phone. Maybe I should have signed up for that five contact phone plan the salesman had tried to sell me.

“That’s good to hear, I was a bit worried when Dr. Jenner said you’d been released before my shift started,” she replied. “There wasn’t anyone waiting for you at home, was there?”

“No, and there wasn’t a phone or anything. It looks like I live alone.”

“Sorry to hear that, that’s really too bad! My girlfriend suggested you come over for dinner tomorrow. It’s no good to spend all your time alone, even if there are people out there looking for you.”

“Thanks, that’s nice of her. And I’m not sure there’s anyone looking for me, from what I’ve seen.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I think I just moved here, but there’s no pictures or computer or anything. I seem like I was a real hermit.”

“That’s too bad, I was really hoping it would work out for you when you got home!” She said, sounding genuinely upset for me. Opal was a really nice lady, I was lucky she’d been assigned to my floor the whole time I’d been there. “I gotta go, my break is about to end. I’ll call you tomorrow with directions to my place, okay?”

“Okay. Thanks, Opal.”

“It’s no problem. And keep your chin up, I’m sure a sweet guy like you has at least one person looking for you. I’ll see you at dinner tomorrow!”

I hung up on Opal, feeling a sharp pang of loneliness. It was really hitting me again how alone I was. And for all I knew, I’d never find anyone who knew me.

Several people walked by me, shooting weird looks at the gangly guy near tears outside a busy cellphone store.

Slowly, I pulled myself together. Crying wasn’t going to change anything. Next stop was food; I was starving.

My phone was a brick, but it was a brick that was still capable of connecting to the internet, so on a whim I searched for the waffle house from the coupon in my wallet.

The only hit was a place a fair distance away on foot, but busses seemed a bit too complicated to attempt so I decided to just tough it out. Maybe after I’d eaten I’d be ready to attempt it for the trip back. If I was lucky it would be like the ATM and I wouldn’t make a fool of myself.

I was definitely footsore and a little damp when I finally arrived at Flo’s. Buying more comfortable shoes would also have to be on the list of things I’d need to get when I went shopping. Maybe I’d buy a hundred pairs of shoes. It wasn’t like it would make a difference to my bank account. Seriously, was I a drug dealer or something? There was only so many ways a guy could have that much money, and it seemed to me that very few of them were on the up and up. Especially given I clearly hadn’t been spending that money on my belongings.

The waffle house was kind of tacky looking in general, with its cracked pink vinyl seats and sticky looking counters, and also very nearly empty given the odd hour of the day.

“Back again?” The waitress sitting at the counter asked me. Her small iridescent wings flittered curiously behind her.

“Um, I guess?” I replied and followed her to a booth.

“Coffee?” She asked me. I nodded and turned over my coffee cup for her.

“Uh. This is going to sound kind of weird but... have I been here before?” I asked when she set my cup down. There really wasn’t any less crazy ways to ask that question. Didn’t stop me from turning bright red at the look she gave me.

She blinked at me in confusion. “Uh yeah? A couple weeks back, you were with your buddy with the tattoos.” She paused and gave me a long, considering look. “Were you really smashed or something? You seemed pretty normal...”

I’d come here with someone? That person had to know at least _something_ about me that would be useful, if only to help me find someone else who knew me. I couldn’t actually have no one in the world. That was just too depressing to even consider.

“Okay, this is going to sound ridiculous, but I’ve lost my memories. All of them. I had a coupon in my wallet for this place,” I told the waitress. “I was sort of hoping I’d find someone here who knew me.”

She frowned and her wings sort of mirrored the movement, flicking downwards and tucking in closer to her torso protectively.  “You’re right that does sound insane. Not in the least because we haven’t given out coupons in years,” she said flatly.

I fished out my wallet and showed her the coupon.

She studied the coupon and then said, “This thing is from like four years ago, its way expired.”

“Look, I know its nuts, but I literally don’t remember anything from before last week, and I can’t find anyone who knows me,” I told her earnestly.

She sighed. “I’m sorry to hear that, buddy. I only recognize you from a few weeks back. Same for the guy you came in with. Do you want me to ask the other staff if they know you?”

I nodded gratefully. “Please. Do you remember anything about the other guy?”

She frowned and tapped a finger on her chin. Behind her, her wings mirrored the motion. “Not really, sorry. It was a few weeks back, on the 7th maybe? I only remembered you because of the hair, even pulled back it was pretty noticeable. The guy you were with had a lot of tattoos, short dark hair and a leather coat. He was... mega attractive? That’s why I remembered him,” she said, blushing a little, and laughed a bit awkwardly, rubbing a hand on the back of her neck.

“Anything else?” I demanded, and then realizing how that probably sounded, tacked on, “Please?”

“Uh, I think he might have been Indonesian or something? I caught a few words he said to you when I got your order, sounded like stuff I’ve heard my cousins say and that’s where they’re from.

“Like I said, you guys were pretty memorable even with the crowd we get in here, but, I mean, I wait on a lot of customers here. So that’s all I really remember. Sorry about that,” She said apologetically.

I sighed. Well it had been a bit of a stretch to hope a waffle house could solve my problems. It was better than nothing.

“Thanks anyways. That’s more than I had before,” I said.

“That’s rough. Can I get you anything to eat?” she asked, pulling out a little notepad.

I glanced down at the menu. At the hospital I’d had a whole lot of bland food, usually the same thing every day. I didn’t even know what kind of food I liked. That was pretty sad.

“Pancakes?” I asked, pointing to the first thing that caught my eye. I wondered if that was another muscle memory thing or just pure chance. Either way, pancakes sounded pretty rad. It struck me as weird that I knew what pancakes were and could remember what they smelled like, but not if I liked them or not. Amnesia was _weird_.

She nodded and jotted it down on her pad. “Sure thing. It’ll be ready in a jiff,” she said, and disappeared into the kitchen.

Okay so I’d known at least one person before I took a stroll down memory lane and just kept going. Dark hair. Tattoos. Attractive. Possibly Indonesian. Owned a leather coat. There was probably a lot of people that described.

It was starting to get dark when I left Flo’s, so I took the bus. I was lucky since there were people already waiting at the stop for the bus that would take me home, so I had people to mirror.

As it turned out, this was a good thing as it seemed I hadn’t taken the bus enough for it to be a habit like the ATM. If my suspicions that I was a recent arrival were true, that would make sense, maybe.

I wasn’t too excited to return to my depressing coffin of home, so naturally the bus ride only took about ten minutes.

Despite there being several people coming and going, no one waved to me when I entered my building. Clearly I hadn’t gone out of my way to introduce myself. I was beginning to seem more and more like a reclusive hermit twice my own age.

Maybe I needed to be more positive. I didn’t know me. Maybe I was just cripplingly shy. Or recently recovered from a horrifically contagious disease that had forced me into isolation. That was completely probably. Or at least just a probable as having actual fucking amnesia.

The lock on my front door was kind of sticky and it took a significant amount of jiggling to get it to give in and let me unlock the door. At least if anyone decided to try and break in while I was home, I’d have plenty of warning.

There, that had been more positive. Sort of.

Inside, I flicked the lights on. It didn’t help much, given there weren’t any lamps, just the ceiling light, leaving the room in partial shadow.

“I guess it’s time to stop procrastinating,” I said to the empty room. Maybe if I kept digging I’d find something useful, or at least get the place to stop feeling like I was trespassing.

The first thing I found was towels. They were scratchy and grey.

“Do I literally own nothing that isn’t shitty and needs to be thrown out?” I asked the pile of towels. They didn’t respond. Clearly I shouldn’t have been released from the hospital if I was crazy enough to be conversing with linens.

Under the towels I found a hand-cranked radio held together mostly with duct tape and a prayer. Yet another point in favour of me being a technophobic old person in the body of a 22 year old.

After a few good cranks the radio came to life, spewing crackly pop music. It was better than sitting in silence, so I cranked it a few more times and set it on the floor next to me.

The next box contained a multitude of small unmarked Ziploc bags filled with... seeds? That was another point in the ‘might be a drug dealer’ category.  I pushed that box away. I’d deal with that later.

The final box in my living room/kitchen was filled with books. Really old, boring books. There didn’t seem to be a common theme between any of them. One was on medieval English poetry, another on automotive repair.

“So I’m a guy who wears shitty clothes, has no friends and spends his nights reading boring books and listening to the radio,” I said, dropping a book on horse breeding back into the box. “If I get any more boring I think I’ll come right back around to interesting.”

There were more boxes in the bedroom- my bedroom- so I abandoned the books to go poke through those.

The first contained dishes, all mix matched like they’d been bought individually from a thrift store. Why was this box in the bedroom and the towel box in the kitchen? Clearly pre-amnesia me had some pretty weird ideas about organization. It wasn’t like there were enough boxes to get them mixed up.

I found a few faded looking blankets in the next box. Useful given that the apartment was getting a little chilly and the ones on the bed didn’t look all too warm.

Under that I finally hit gold. A journal, going by the title stamped in fake, faded gold on the spine.

“Bless you, past me,” I said and eagerly opened it. Finally, a step in the right direction.

It was written in code. The words were utterly unreadable.

“What the fuck?”

I flipped through, disbelievingly. What would a guy who spent his time reading boring books and listening to the radio need to write a personal journal in code for?

I came to the end of the book, the last few pages unfilled. The journal on the whole looked rather worn, like I’d owned it for a long time. The different entries didn’t have dates and were only distinguishable by the different colours of ink.

I tossed the journal down on the floor in disgust. And then shoved the box away too because I was just so damn frustrated. It toppled over with an unsatisfying thud.

I stood up, intent on having a shower now that I had towels. The other boxes would have to wait.

My foot caught on a piece of paper that had fallen out of the box. It was faded with age, the edges worn.

I picked it up gently and unfolded it.

_My dearest Aster,_

_I know this is possibly the last time you will ever hear from me and sending that such a letter poses a risk for both of us, but I could not when I fear the worst is about to come._

_Three days ago I fled my final safe-house. It was the last of those that I prepared before we left home, and I suspect they will find me soon. But I could not bear knowing that you thought me safe and never hearing from me again. Knowing the doubts that plague you, I feared you would think I’d abandoned you, or our cause. I’ve said it a thousand times and I’d say it a thousand times again: never doubt my love for you, no matter what happens, I will always love you, my dear._

_Darling, I know that this letter was a poor choice for both of us, but I needed you to know how much I love you. I love your sense of morality, and your courageousness to choose to do what is right despite the environment in which we were both brought up. So easily could you have been like those monsters- so easily could I have been, if not for you._

_I never regretted our choice, and I never will, even beyond my dying day, darling, even though it has meant being apart from you for so many long years. Never think that I regret it, even if it costs me my life. My only regret should the worst come to pass is that I could not keep you safe._

_My love, I pray you are safe, and that the Watchers do not find you, or this letter. I have heard rumours of a safe place, and should I find it, I will endeavour to send word to you. Perhaps it might be safe enough for us to meet again._

_Be safe._

_With all my love._

_T_

I stared dumbly at the letter. I had so many questions.

The first being: who the hell was Aster? My name was Simon Jones.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Okay. So. I’d finally found something useful. Or at least interesting compared to the reams of other useless shit I owned.

It was a love letter, essentially. From someone named T to someone named Aster. Both of whom were in danger, possibly from someone or something called the Watchers.

Had I been really deep into roleplaying or something?

I glanced down at the letter I was still cradling in my hands.

It looked worn, like someone- me?- had read it and reread it thousands of times, but it was less creased than its age indicated it should have been it had been treated with utmost gentleness, treasured and cherished. The only creases in it were from where the paper had been carefully folded.

In spite of the flowery, romantic words, it was written in ordinary ballpoint pen on ordinary lined paper. If it was a roleplaying thing, wouldn’t it be done in calligraphy on a fake scroll or something? At the very least I’d expect a mention of buried treasure or a prophecy or some shit. This was loving, but ultimately sad. T had been convinced they were about to die and had wanted to comfort his lover.

My hands trembled slightly. It wasn’t addressed to me but it had been... intense.

Somehow I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t real, that there wasn’t, or hadn’t been, a T desperately in love with someone named Aster.

Was Aster a man’s name or a woman’s name? Why had T used an initial for themselves but had named their lover?

More importantly, were there any more letters?

I dug through the box, but it was just more useless odds and ends; an ancient alarm clock, a bottle of pine cologne, a box of chalk. Wait- the journal. The letter wasn’t crinkled like it had just been tossed into the box willy nilly. Had it been tucked into the journal and I hadn’t noticed it falling out?

I flipped through the journal again but nothing fell out.

I sat back on my heels, feeling defeated. Then I shot to my feet when I remembered that there had been other books. I stumbled back into the kitchen, still cradling the letter. The box of books was right where I’d left it. Setting the letter down, I pulled out the automotive repair book. It was a pretty large book, but flipping through it didn’t reveal any letters. Still not giving up, I went through all of the other books. To no avail.

I still wasn’t giving up. There was one box left in the bedroom. There had to be _something_ in there. Surely a man could only own so many useless things that said nothing about his life.

In the box there were three more journals, almost identical to the first, though all of their pages were filled. They didn’t contain any more letters either. Under that I found more odds and ends.

A small photograph was in the mess. It looked like it was for a passport or something, the background was plain white and I stared at the camera, unsmiling. My hair was pulled back in a severe, unforgiving bun, my eyes a cold hint of green. The only thing of note was the bruise marring my face, on the bottom corner of my mouth. It was an ugly purple-blue, positioned like I’d gotten a nasty right hook to the face.

Who went around punching a boring book reader?

A boring book reader who had an old romantic letter and wrote his journals in code. Why had I taken a picture like that? I knew that it couldn’t _actually_ be for a passport, or any other official documents. The police who had taken me to the hospital had said I wasn’t registered for a passport, all I had to my name was a driver’s license and presumably a birth certificate. Not to mention that the bruise would likely have made the photo impossible to use.

I dug through what was left in the box, hoping for at least a _hint_. There was nothing useful; a blank card with marigolds printed on the front, a purple ribbon, and some kind of polished stone.

The last object, I took out of the box to look at more closely. It was a deep scarlet red and sparkled when the dim light of the ceiling lamp hit it. It looked almost absurd in juxtaposition with the shabbiness of the rest of the room. It was clearly expensive given its size and lack of flaws. I tapped it on the floor; it didn’t sound like plastic. Was it made of glass?

I weighed it in my hand. Would a glass gem be heavier than an actual gemstone? It felt pretty heavy. Almost heavier than I thought it should have been, given its size.

Why had I owned this thing? It seemed a touch ornate to be a paperweight.

Well, it seemed like Simon Jones was less boring than I’d thought, but I didn’t have any more answers than I’d started with.

I gave up. There was nothing more to be found in the boxes. Sitting on the floor and staring at the letter, the picture and the gemstone wasn’t going to tell me anything either.

I took a shower, dried off with the sad, grey towels and curled up in my tiny, cold bed.

The evening of a real champion.

Contrary to what it may seem like, being an amnesiac isn’t all fun and ‘try and guess who you are’ games.

I woke up five hours after I’d fallen asleep.

My heart was pounding, my clothing soaked in sweat. Pre-amnesia Simon hadn’t believed in pyjamas apparently, so I’d worn the sweatpants and blue t-shirt to sleep.

My dreams had been filled with blood and river water slowly filling my lungs and eyes staring accusingly at me in the dark and hands holding me down.

So, nothing new.

I got up and drank water directly out of the tap since I couldn’t be bothered to find a cup in the box of mismatched dishes. I contemplated taking a second shower to wash of the stale sweat sticking to me, but I couldn’t find the energy. I was so tired.

I picked up the letter and the gemstone. I laid back down on my bed and reread the letter until my eyes grew too heavy. I fell into a light doze, just barely asleep.

It felt like barely any time had passed before knocking at my door woke me up fully. The light coming in through my window was brighter and from a different angle, so clearly several hours had passed. The letter and gemstone were still laying on the bed next to my hand.

The knocking came again.

“Just a minute!” I yelled at the door. Rolling out of bed, I took stock of my current appearance. I was still in my gross, sweaty clothing. My hair was a rat’s nest- probably why pre-amnesia me kept it pulled up. What if it was someone who had been looking for me?

Getting dressed wouldn’t really be much of an improvement, given what I had to work with, so I just opened the door as I was.

Officer Nikolaidis was waiting patiently in the hall, his uniform as neat and tidy as it had been every time I’d seen him while in the hospital. HIs hands were carefully folded behind his back, making me think of the phrase ‘parade rest’. He was only a police officer, but something told me he’d been in the military at some point in his career, if only because of those muscles. You didn’t get those from sitting behind a desk. His partner and all the other police officers I’d encountered were a great deal softer around the middle than he was. The haircut didn’t hurt either, it was military short.

“Good morning, I hope I didn’t wake you up,” he said, taking in my appearance with a look of surprise, “But I wanted to talk to you before I have to go in for my shift.”

My heart sped up. Did he have any information for me? The police hadn’t really known what to do with me; no one knew who I was and, while my wounds looked like they’d been inflicted by another person, I didn’t remember getting them, much less the person responsible. Pressing charges had been out of the question, unless I wanted to sue the universe at large.

Well, I kind of did, if only to say ‘fuck you for taking all of my memories, jackass’.

Nikolaidis had been a bit more sympathetic than his female partner, so he’d promised to keep me informed on anything he was allowed to tell me. And here he was. Obviously he was here to do that.

I realized abruptly that given the way I was holding the door, Nikolaidis was stuck waiting in the hall while I blanked out. Nice going, Simon. God, I was so tired.

“Sorry. Come in. Sorry about the mess... and lack of chairs,” I said, letting him in. The kitchen had a card table and a single bar stool at the counter. Clearly furniture hadn’t been a priority for me. Obviously sitting on the floor sounded like a fun time to a guy who spent his time reading up on dust mould.

Nikolaidis poked his head in through the doorway and said, very politely, “Why don’t I take you for a late breakfast?”

Yeah, if I were him, I wouldn’t have wanted to hang out at my place either.

I took one look at the mess I’d left on the kitchen floor the previous night and nodded quickly.

“Sure, just let me brush my teeth real quick,” I said. He agreed, so I left him standing in the doorway and ducked into the bedroom.

I discovered, not to my surprise, that I did not in fact own a toothbrush, or even toothpaste, so I had to settle for splashing water on my face and changing into yesterday’s jeans. There was no need to get my second pair of sad jeans dirty.

I really wanted to have _words_ with pre-amnesia me, particularly in the hygiene department. No wonder I had no friends; my stench must have sent anyone in a twenty foot radius running in the opposite direction.

When I reappeared, Nikolaidis tucked his phone away and smiled brightly. His teeth looked exceptionally white in contrast with his faintly azure skin.

“Ready to go? There’s a place about a block away that I’ve been to before, if that’s alright,” he said.

I shoved my wallet, keys and phone into my pockets and replied, “Sure thing. I can’t exactly make any recommendations myself.”

Nikolaidis chuckled and we set out into the city.

The place he’d picked was a lot cutesier than I’d have expected from a guy who was over six foot and build like a brick shithouse, but it smelled like heaven inside, so I made no judgements.

“My niece loves it here,” he explained once we were seated with coffee. Well coffee for me, some sort of salt water concoction for him. I had the impression that several generations back he had oceanid blood in his family tree or something of the like, given his faintly webbed fingers, and the skin. And the eyes. Especially the eyes. Even if Nikolaidis was a total cupcake, the whole pure black eyes and no whites was kind of frightening.

“I’m so hungry you probably could have taken me anywhere and I would have been happy,” I replied, eagerly opening the menu.

Nikolaidis frowned, a very small crease appearing between his eyebrows. “I did notice that your kitchen looked a bit... bare. Are you going to be alright, er that it is to say...” He stuttered, looking uncomfortable yet really concerned. His massive shoulders were nearly hunched up all the way to his ears in embarrassment. Nikolaidis was a real pretty stand up fellow, in my opinion.

I cut him off before he could get around to asking if I was flat ass broke. In the kindest way possible, since he was such a polite guy.

“No I’m okay, I’ll be fine. It looks like I only recently moved in, there wasn’t much of anything in the fridge,” I explained. There wasn’t much of anything in the entire place, to be honest, but I wasn’t about to tell Nikolaidis that. He was a real sweet person, and even if he was mostly just doing his job, I didn’t want to worry him when it wasn’t necessary. I had scads of money to blow on groceries.

“That sounds like what I heard from your landlord when I spoke to him,” he replied, sipping his drink.

“You spoke to my landlord?” I asked. I probably should have felt like my privacy had been invaded, but frankly I’d never have thought of that, and wouldn’t have known how to go about doing it to boot. Also that was kind of his job.

“Just trying to be thorough,” he replied, eyes darting up, like he expected me to be mad. “She implied you were subletting from another tenant, which wasn’t authorized, but she wasn’t going to notice as long as she got her cut. Payments were in cash, so no leads there either.”

Well there went one more lead. It was like pre-amnesia me had gone out of my way to not talk to anyone or something.

“Anything else?” I asked hopefully, once the waitress left with our orders.

To my disappointment, Nikolaidis shook his head.

“No, I’m sorry. There’s been no other leads,” he paused, eyes dropping back down the table. Even with those creepy pure black eyes he managed to look like a kicked puppy. “And I’m being reassigned when I start my shift this afternoon. It’s a busy time for the force right now and...” He trailed off helplessly and shot me an apologetic look.

“They don’t need to waste you on a single guy who isn’t causing any problems?” I guessed with a deep sigh.

Nikolaidis nodded. “I’m sorry. I’m going to still keep an eye out and do what I can, but...”

“No... I understand.” It sucked big time. But I got it. We lived in a big city and there were always conflicts going on between the various fae groups and magic users and normal folk and everything in between, especially in the springtime when energies were at their highest. And he’d said there wasn’t really any other angles to search. That didn’t mean I wasn’t the tiniest bit pissed that the police had already given up on me after less than a fortnight.

We ate our breakfasts in silence, downhearted.

“Did you find anything at home?” He asked, trying to cheer me up, I supposed.

“A few things. No contact info, though,” I replied.

“Don’t give up hope,” he said to me, voice deeply sincere.

At the end of our meal, as we were about to head our separate ways, he handed me a business card.

“I’m not a big name in the force or anything, but if you’re ever in trouble, please contact me,” he said as he handed it over. “I can only imagine how awful it must be to be alone like this, so if you just want to talk that’s also alright.”

Abruptly, I felt a bit overwhelmed. I’d spoken to Nikolaidis roughly three times while still at the hospital. We were even less friends than I was with Opal. What had I done to deserve this? He was a really great guy.

Going home was only slightly less depressing than it had been the previous night, the only improvement being the lack of rain and the increase in sunlight.

I contemplated properly unpacking my meager belongings and cleaning up the mess I’d made.

Instead, I flopped on my bed bonelessly to reread the letter again.

It was the only clue I had, aside from the man I’d supposedly been with at Flo’s. If I could find Aster or the mysterious T, maybe I could find something, _anything_ to explain who I was.

Eventually I got up the will to drag myself out of bed to hydrate myself since my mouth felt dryer than desert. Obviously since everything I owned was a piece of shit, the plastic cup I was drinking out of all but disintegrated in my hand, drenching me.

I very calmly threw the broken cup in the sink so hard it broke into three more pieces. There hadn’t been any kitchen towels in any of the boxes, so I gingerly peeled off my already wet t-shirt to mop up the worst of the water off of the floor. I was very tempted to throw the shirt in after the cup, but because I was a goddamn adult I wrung it out in the sink and hung it up in the bathroom.

The bottom drawer was even harder to get open than the first time. It took me straining with all my might to get it to begrudgingly slide open a scant few inches, just enough for me to slide out one of the button down shirts. At least the one I grabbed was actually white and didn’t have any visible gross stains. The fact that _that_ was something to be grateful for depressed me.

The shirt was easier to get on with the position of my stitches, but that didn’t make me feel any less irritated. I couldn’t help but prod at my stitches a little and winced. They were nearly healed and no longer needed bandages over them but they itched like crazy and pinched when I moved my arms over my head too much.

When I left the hospital, Dr. Jenner had been concerned about how slowly I was healing, but had tentatively made me an appointment a week after my discharge to have them removed. When he told me how long I’d have to wait, I asked him if he enjoyed torturing me, but he’d only laughed and told me my skin couldn’t actually crawl off, unless I had several _very_ interesting demonic relatives. Dr. Jenner had a funny sense of humor. Funny as in freaked me the hell out for as solid six hours. Luckily, Opal had assured me that something like that would have shown up in my blood work right off the bat.

I really probably should have started to unpack the remaining boxes. My apartment wasn’t terribly large; a mouse probably would have still called it cozy. Being full of boxes and whatever objects I’d left abandoned on the floor wasn’t helping its already limited floor space. Eventually, I was going to trip over something and it would be only my own damn fault. It was a forgone conclusion with that much crap lying around in wait.

Instead of being a responsible adult, I left my apartment in search of a laptop. That shit could remain in their boxes for a few more hours.

I returned to the store where I’d gotten my cellphone the day before. The store was mostly aimed at cellphones, but did have a smaller section other electronics and I was too lazy to bother to find a store more tailored to my needs.

Fifty five minutes later I was the proud owner of a laptop, a case for it, and some sort of doohickey that would let me connect to the internet despite my apartment’s lack of wifi or other internet apparatuses.

The whole trip would have been a lot faster had I not nearly left the store before realizing the whole ‘lack of internet’ problem and the fact that the salesman (a different one from the previous visit) was so hung up on finding me the _perfect_ laptop for _exactly_ what I was going to use it for. So a good twenty minutes was spent with him asking me what I needed and me going ‘literally just capable of connecting to the internet’ and then him replying doggedly ‘yes all of our laptops do that, what do you need _specifically_?’ It was a rather exhausting conversation. Eventually I just asked him to find me the most expensive one in the store that was still a cute colour. That sped things up a lot, probably because of the commission he’d get off it.

So I took my rather expensive new sky blue laptop and internet thing home, vowing that I’d make an effort to put at least a few things away properly.

That didn’t even last five seconds when I got home. I parked my ass on my bed with the letter and gemstone next to me and spent ten minutes setting the computer up.

First, I just searched my name. The nurses had tried this, probably along with several police officers, to no avail. Unsurprisingly, while there were a lot of hits for ‘Simon Jones’, none of them were me. Unless I’d undergone extensive plastic surgery prior to becoming an amnesiac.

Then I tried ‘missing persons’. I found a lot of sites filled with pages and pages dedicated to people who had gone missing. The most reputable looking one had a filter for when the person was last seen and physical description. There were no results for anyone matching my description from the last month.

Well, I hadn’t actually expected either of those attempts to work; the police would have to be outstandingly shitty at their job if that worked. That didn’t mean it didn’t make me feel a little defeated.

Next I tried ‘Aster’ and ‘T’ and ‘lovers’. Mostly that turned up summaries of two dollar romance novels, ski resorts and romance novels set at ski resorts.

I tried ‘loser who reads boring books and writes in code’ but that was even less helpful.

The thought of tossing my brand new laptop into the nearest wall was majorly tempting, but I’d only just got it. Even if I was loaded, the idea being that wasteful just irritated me too much. So I carefully set it aside and spent the rest of the afternoon being an adult and putting all of my crappy belongings away.

I lacked any shelving, so everything, including the books, went into the kitchen cupboards. The boxes, I took great pleasure in collapsing and tossing more violently than necessary into the building’s recycling bin. It was less cathartic than I’d hoped, but it did make me feel the tiniest bit better.

Finally, it was late enough that I could head to Opal’s without arriving obnoxiously early. Even if I was rich, a job was probably a good idea. A man could only contemplate his identity for so many hours a day before he gets bored.

After a quick conversation getting directions, and assuring Opal that no I didn’t need her girlfriend to escort me there since I had the public transit thing totally mastered, I set out.

It was a little more complicated than my only other bus trip, but it was still fairly brainless. So I spent the hour long trip contemplating my identity.

I hadn’t been out of the hospital long, but I was nowhere near closer to finding out who I was than when I’d left. I had plenty of cryptic nonsense in the form of the letter and the man from Flo’s, but it wasn’t anything _useful_. I had no more ideas on what to try next. What was I going to do? Why did I feel so different from the Simon the apartment belonged to? Every step of the way had me shaking my head and asking ‘why’. How could amnesia change a man so deeply? While I was lacking memories, I was, theoretically, the same person at heart.

The end of my bus ride ended that line of thinking. It was pointless to keep worrying over anyways. I’d find something. I would.

Opal wasn’t home yet when I got there, so her girlfriend let me in.

“I’m Sadie Foster, just call me Foster. Nice to meet you, Simon,” she said when she opened the door.

“You too,” I said, looking down. _Way_ down. Foster was pretty short, almost comical when compared to me. We were pretty much opposites, her colouring much darker and warmer than mine, and her hair lush, dark and curly and cropped short.

“Thank you for inviting me,” I replied and followed her inside. Their apartment was only slightly larger than mine, but exponentially nicer looking. Everything was tidy and colour coordinated, with a different set of colours for each room. It didn’t just blow my place out of the water, but out of the solar system too.

“No prob, it’s the least we can do. Opal sounded worried about how you’d be doing on your own after you were released. Go ahead and sit down, Opal will be home soon to start dinner. I can burn water so I’m banned from the kitchen,” She said and gestured to the pure white couch that dominated most of the shared kitchen-living room space. It had to be magic; there was no way anyone could actually use it as a piece of furniture without spilling at least a little coffee on its upholstery.

“I haven’t been brave enough to attempt cooking yet, for all I know I’m in the same boat as you,” I said as Foster settled down on a chair across from me.

“Might be a good choice, it would suck to burn down your new home less than a week after getting home from the hospital,” Foster joked.

“It’s not like there’d be much to lose,” I replied wryly. Foster looked curious, but bit her lip, as if to prevent herself from saying anything. It wasn’t like I was shy about my current situation, just mildly embarrassed (by my past self mostly) so I continued. “I don’t own a whole lot to begin with, and most of it is stuff that any normal person would have replaced years ago.”

“Guess you haven’t had much time to go shopping yet either,” Foster mused agreeably.

I blinked. For all that I hadn’t quit bitching about my pre-amnesiac self’s life choices, I’d not actually considered changing it all. I’d certainly thought, mostly sardonically, about all the things I could purchase, but not about things I could just _throw out_ and buy new versions of. As a person who had very little clues about his own history, it seemed wrong to just toss out things that I owned. It was like throwing out the very few links to the past I had at that point.

“Yeah, I guess so,” I agreed after an awkwardly long pause.

Luckily, before either of us had to attempt to continue the uncomfortable conversation, Opal arrived.

“So where is the couch located now?” She yelled from down the hall.

“It’s right where you left it!” Foster yelled back with a grin.

A few seconds later Opal appeared in the room, tossing her coat onto one of the empty chairs in the living room area.

She was a study in contrast to her girlfriend; taller and with a full figure and gentle gray eyes, opposed to Foster’s angular looks and sharp, dark eyes.

“Excuse me for not trusting it to be in the same spot as it was this morning,” she replied with mock exasperation, fussing with her hijab minutely. It was a dark purple that day, several shades darker than the pastel scrubs she was wearing.

“For the last time, the organization of the room made no sense with the couch where it was, I _had_ to change it,” Foster argued back. I didn’t need to see Opal’s look of exasperated affection to know this was an argument they’d had many times.

“Every time I come home I swear it’s going to be completely rearranged,” Opal said to me as she passed, on her way to the kitchen. “The dangers of dating a budding interior decorator.”

“Everyone needs a hobby,” Foster replied with great dignity.

“I wouldn’t care about your hobby if it didn’t mean you kept moving all of my things!” Opal shouted back with her head stuck in a cupboard. “We’re having pasta tonight, if that’s alright with you, Simon.”

“That’s fine,” I said. Home cooked food sounded really amazing, especially if it involved vegetables. Eating out for every meal wasn’t doing wonders for maintaining a balanced diet. I probably needed to get on that cooking thing in the near future.

Opal dropped a few containers onto the counter and turned to face us with her hands on her hips. If it weren’t for the corner of her mouth twitching, I would have thought her to be actually quite angry.

“Okay, Foster. Serious question time: did you move anything in my spice drawer. Because you’re the one who’s going to suffer if I can’t tell chili powder from garlic powder.”

Foster rolled her eyes to the high heavens and sighed gustily. “ _Dios mios_ , of course I didn’t move your spices. I still haven’t recovered from the last time.”

Opal snorted and grinned in satisfaction. “Good. You learned your lesson.” She set to work making dinner, chopping things up and other culinary things. Even if I wasn’t an amnesiac, I somehow doubted I’d be able to recognize half the tools she used; it all seemed rather complicated.

In less time than I thought would be necessary, dinner was ready and Foster and I were permitted to enter the kitchen to set the small table crammed under the window. A third chair, clearly not belonging in the kitchen given how it didn’t match everything else, had been brought in for me before hand and forced to fit in the already cozy quarters.

“So, Simon, have you found anything yet?” Opal asked as she passed around a basket of bread. “You sounded a little defeated last time we talked.”

“Nothing much,” I replied with a sigh. “Well, I found some stuff. Just nothing useful, just real weird.”

“Like what?” Foster asked curiously.

I accepted the bowl of pasta she passed me and explained, “I found a bunch of journals that I’m assuming are mine, but they’re written in code.”

Foster’s eyebrows shot up. “Like spies or something?” she asked.

“Or something, I don’t know. It’s super weird. I can’t imagine why I would do that. Maybe to annoy whoever tried to read them without permission. Joke’s on me, I guess.”

“Did you find anything else? I was really hoping for you,” Opal said with a sympathetic look.

“A picture of myself, for some reason. Looks like someone gave me a nasty right hook too. And there was a letter, which was the weirdest out of everything. And a waitress said she saw me with some guy a few weeks back, but couldn’t give much of a description.”

“A letter?” Opal asked, “What about it was it weird? What did it say?”

“It was addressed to someone named Aster and the sender only called themselves ‘T’. It was really touching, but weird- it sounded like these guys were in danger and T was telling Aster they loved them one last time.”

“Wow. Sounds like something out of a movie or something,” Foster laughed, “Are you sure it wasn’t a prop or something? It’s almost too bizarre to believe.”

“I know right? I don’t know. It looked like it was pretty old, but had been handled really carefully. It feels real somehow. Who knows, though. I didn’t find any other letters, aside from that one.”

“Too bad,” Foster remarked. “What about that guy you were seen with?”

“Have you told the police? Maybe that might help them out,” Opal suggested.

“I actually saw one of the officers who was working on my case this morning, it sounds like they aren’t going to put any more time into it.”

Opal frowned, lips pursing. It was the least happy expression I’d ever seen on her face. She was a real sunshiney person, even when she had the graveyard shift or had to change bedpans. I got the impression she’d be doing a better job than I at staying positive if she were the amnesiac.

“That’s terrible. How can they just do that?” She demanded, mostly to herself.

“You can’t let them get away with that; it hasn’t even been even a month since you lost your memories,” Foster said hotly, eyes fierce.

“Foster- don’t say it like that, it’s not like he can force the police to continue working on his case,” Opal admonished. She shot me a quick apologetic look.

“Yes he can, he should sue. If they aren’t going to do their jobs properly, they shouldn’t be police officers,” Foster argued back.

“I’m sure they did the best they could...” Opal said reasonably, but Foster remained unconvinced.

“Yeah, it sounded like they ran out of leads,” I said, a bit grumpily.

“What about that guy you were seen with?” Foster asked.

“The waitress couldn’t give me much of a description; Indonesian, dark hair, tattoos and worse a leather coat,” I said.

“Wow. Could she have given a more useless description? That could be nearly anyone,” Foster said with a roll of her eyes.

“It’s not like she was going to memorize every customer she served. It’s lucky that she even recognized Simon. Was there anything else that she remembered?” Opal asked as she started to clear the table.

I shrugged. “She said he was attractive.”

“That would probably be a given with the tattoos and leather coat,” Foster snorted with a grin.

“Well if I see any attractive, Indonesian guys with tattoos and a leather coat, I will interrogate them suitably,” Opal promised me with a wink.

“Don’t get into trouble on my account. Foster’s right, that could be nearly anyone.”

“Like talking to attractive guys would be that much of a chore. Any guy would be lucky for Opal to interrogate them, they would be begging her to do it,” Foster joked, making her girlfriend blush and pretend to throw a used napkin at her.

From there the conversation drifted, mostly towards stories Opal had from working at the hospital and of Foster’s large family and their antics.

It was a pleasant way to spend the evening, especially after a day and a half with only my shitty apartment for company, and time passed quickly. Eventually it was time for Opal to go to bed since she had a very early shift at the hospital the next day. Since the bus I’d taken there had stopped running, Foster offered to come with me part way home to make sure I didn’t get lost on the different route.

We sat on an empty bus in silence for a solid fifteen minutes without Opal to facilitate conversation before Foster spoke up.

“Look... how likely is it at this point that you’ll recover your memories?” She asked bluntly.

I sighed. The doctor hadn’t been overly optimistic. I’d not remembered anything, aside from knowing basics like how to talk and walk and apparently how to put in my PIN number at the bank. I hadn’t had any sense of deja vu, or even any dreams of familiar things. My tests had been inconclusive as to why I’d lost my memories so completely.

Very gently, when I left the doctor had told me that my best chance at recovering memories would be to try and jog them in a familiar location or with familiar people. But it was just that, a chance. And a small one at that. So far it hadn’t worked out.

“Pretty small,” I admitted after a pause. Just admitting it made it feel more real, like I’d just ruined my chances by saying it.

Foster pursed her lips, apparently searching for the right words, then sighed, shoulders relaxing.

“I’m going to say this wrong- but maybe you should give up trying to be the person you used to be,” she said, eyes meeting mine firmly.

“Excuse me?” I said, utterly baffled and the slightest bit insulted. I had no idea who I was or where I came from or who my family or friends were. I knew next to nothing about myself, and this woman who I’d only just met wanted me to give that up? To my mind it felt like setting fire to your own home because you couldn’t find a missing pair of socks.

“Look, you said it yourself; you probably aren’t going to remember everything, or maybe no anything. What’s the point in trying to be this guy who you so far don’t like too much? That guy is gone, but you’re still here,” she explained.

“It’s been like a week,” I replied, words falling out of my stunned mouth without much thought.

“If you don’t like that guy now, how much you want to bet he liked himself to begin with?” Foster countered.

“I get off here,” I said by way of reply and got off the bus.

Obviously, it was the wrong stop. I hadn’t even checked where I was before getting off. I’d just needed to stop the conversation.

Luckily I knew how to get home from where I was, I just needed to wait for the next bus. On the other hand: I had to wait for the next bus. Alone. Without anything to do but think about what Foster had said.

She was probably right.

So far, I didn’t really like the image of pre-amnesia Simon I was getting: a guy with no friends or family that tried to find him when he went missing. No one had contacted the police or the hospital about a missing person matching my description. My name didn’t match any online posts about a missing friend, brother or son. No one had left any messages at my apartment or had stopped by. Even my landlady didn’t know me from Adam. It had been over two weeks since I’d been taken to the hospital. Someone would have noticed me missing if they were going to notice. What kind of person purposefully went through life without trying to make at least a single friend?

Because it had to be purposeful. In the short time that I’d been ‘alive’ so to speak I’d made two with little effort, three if you counted Officer Nikolaidis.

That, or pre-amnesiac Simon was a real asshole.

Foster was right: I in no way wanted to be that Simon.

Didn’t mean I had to like it though.

My trip home alone was uneventful and I immediately flopped onto my bed when I got home.

It wasn’t like I had a toothbrush to brush my teeth with.

I really needed to fix that. Later. At some point.

Everything was where I’d left it; mostly put away and the gemstone, letter and picture on my bed alongside my new laptop.

I picked up the picture up to look at it a bit closer.

That hairstyle had been a bit of a mistake, it made my face look severe and unfriendly, unhelped by the enormous bruise and my biting green eyes, narrowed ever so slightly, as if to say _Try me, jackass._

Wait. Green?

My eyes were blue.


	3. Chapter 3

I stumbled into the bathroom, clutching the picture.

In the mirror, my eyes were blue.

“Okay, so I’m not going crazy,” I said to my reflection.

That probably wasn’t something a sane person would do.

I looked at the photo again.

My eyes in the photo were definitely green.

“Still not going crazy,” I told my reflection.

That was probably a bad habit to get into.

Okay. So my eyes were different coloured. I probably was just wearing coloured contacts in the photo. After being beaten up. Contacts that would probably be expensive and that I hadn’t seen any evidence of in my belongings.

There was as explanation for that. If I thought about it for a bit, it would make perfect sense.

Instead, I went to bed. I was exhausted, as usual, and sitting on my ass worrying would be just as productive as me starfishing on my bed and going to sleep. It definitely wasn’t me avoiding thinking about how increasingly frightening and bizarre my little tiny world was becoming. Obviously not. Really, things could only go so much weirder, so in a way this latest development was a good thing. Somehow.

A few days passed in relentless monotony: I’d get up, rattle around in my apartment, go to bed and then repeat the whole dull process again. I mostly ate take out or went to Flo’s and stared intently at every dark haired patron that came in. I flipped through my boring books, trying to figure out their purpose. I scoured every webpage dedicated to finding missing persons in existence. I took a stab at decoding the journals. Occasionally I texted Opal, just to let her know I was still living.

Things were spectacular only in how dull and repetitive they were, so obviously my dreams responded correspondingly by becoming unique and singular in how they terrified me each night.

The seventh night after I’d gotten out of the hospital was especially awful.

In the dream, I was standing in the bathroom of my apartment, but things were ever so slightly wrong. The floor was heaving back and forth like I was standing on the deck of a rolling ship in a storm, and the walls stood ever so slightly at the wrong angles, like they’d been tipped to the left by an unseen hand. The porcelain of the bathroom sink felt hot and slick under my hands and pulsated under my hands like it was the side of some enormous beast.

My mouth was filled with blood, coppery and hot, gagging me as it slid down my throat. My green-eyed self smirked at me from the mirror across from me.

“Stop that,” I tried to say, but only spluttered on blood that fell from my mouth. As it hit the bathroom sink, it transformed into carnations, scarlet red ones that oozed and shone like liquid jewels.

“It’s your fault,” Green-eyed Simon said, grinning so wide I could see all of his teeth. They were sharpened to points and bloody like he’d just taken a bite out of something.

“Stop that!” I yelled at the mirror. Blood splattered from my mouth over the other Simon’s face, but he only grinned wider. I watched as my own hands moved without my volition to coil around green-eyed Simon’s throat.

“You thought you were good enough! You thought you could save him!” He said and began to laugh, big heaving ones that shook his whole body. Abruptly his laughs stopped, his face growing frighteningly serious as his eyes bore into mine. “It’s the biggest joke ever been told. You knew this would never end, you could never stop it, you useless child.”

Then his face twisted and he started to laugh again like he hadn’t stopped.

“Stop that!” I yelled again.

My hands tightened around his neck. His lips turned purple like twin bruises, silent laughs still shaking his body.  A single puff of air left his lungs as eyes rolled back into his head but he didn’t stop laughing.

“It wasn’t your fault,” a different voice whispered in my ear, low and comforting. I felt someone brush against my spine, light and fleeting and as insubstantial as silk caught on a gust of wind. I wanted to look to see who it was, but my eyes were frozen on the mirror version of myself.

The other Simon’s lips didn’t move, because he was dead, but I still heard his sing song voice echoing in my head saying “You were always going to fail” as I woke up.

I sat up gasping for breath like I’d been the one being choked.

“I am one seriously fucked up guy,” I said to the room at large. I seriously needed to get out of this habit of talking to myself. After that dream my sanity clearly didn’t need any help slipping down the drain.

I wasn’t sure what scared me more, my dreams, or the fact that my brain seemed to have no problem producing such horrors. Maybe pre-amnesia I’d worked on set for horror movies. Or I’d been a psychotic serial killer.

I rolled over and tried to smother myself in my pillow. Seriously, if I could take a walk away from my own brain, I would have done it. After an uncomfortable moment of breathing gross, humid air, I rolled back over and checked the time.

According to my glittery pink cellphone it was 5:06. In the morning. How disgusting.

“Plenty of people probably wake up at this time,” I said out loud. I doubted many of them dreamed about asphyxiating their evil twin while choking on blood.

I decided that my goal that day was to put aside trying to find out my identity and focus on being a normal adult. If I spent another moment thinking about all the unknowns that surrounded me, I was probably going to go insane. More insane. This was my life and like it or not, I was stuck with how things were and who I was, so I might as well make myself as comfortable and happy as I could.

A loud creak came from the bathroom door inching open unaided. I shrieked loudly and nearly fell out of bed, sheets tangled around my legs.

Yeah I was a normal adult. A normal adult who wanted to get the fuck out of their scary apartment that very instant.

I stood in the kitchen in my boxers and stared at the barren fridge blankly. A normal adult would respond to this situation by going grocery shopping and since that would involve not being in my scary home, I decided that was my plan.

In record time I got dressed and out the door, keys, phone, and wallet in hand.

Because it was the asscrack of dawn, the streets were empty. Roughly the second I stepped outside, I realized the flaw in my plan: not only were the majority of busses not yet running, most grocery stores weren’t open either.

I ended up walking to Flo’s, not out of hunger but because I remembered it was open 24 hours and I was craving something familiar, even if no one actually knew me there.

Flo’s was a lot busier than it had been the last few times I’d been there, filled with other early risers sitting alongside those who obviously hadn’t yet gone to bed. Most folks were human, or at least looked like it, but there was a trio of women I pegged as being dryads who were clustered around the counter with mugs of pine needle tea, which I could smell the second I entered the place. In the corner of the restaurant, there was a figure draped head to toe in shimmering, gauzy black fabric that made every hair on my body stand on end before I quickly averted my gaze.

In a funny coincidence, it was the same waitress as my first time visiting who was my server that morning. She showed me to an open booth and poured me a coffee without even needing to ask if I wanted one. I didn’t really want to know how bad I looked to get that sort of service, but I wasn’t going to question it.

Before she could leave, I drained the coffee in one long, burning, swallow and set the cup back down, gesturing for another.

“How are things going?” She asked as she poured me a second cup. She glanced down at the cup, then back up to my face. “Actually, I guess I can figure that out myself.”

“Yeah,” I said with a wry smile, “Things are fantastic.”

I hung out at Flo’s for a few hours, mostly just drinking coffee. I probably would have killed a man to get a full night’s sleep, given that I’d yet to have one since I’d woken up at the hospital. That dream had left me feeling kind of nauseated, so I decided against food, since even the smell from the kitchen was making me want to puke. Mostly, I felt jittery and too awake and exhausted. The diner was too loud for me to jump at every noise I heard, but I whipped my head around every time the bell over the door jingled with a new customer.

My waitress, Alison, while she refilled my cup a third time, apologetically explained that none of the staff she’d asked remembered anyone of my description or that of the guy with me. Well that hadn’t been really probable anyways, and she was nice enough to let me hog an entire four person booth instead of making me move to the counter or to a smaller table despite how busy it was.

Not long after Alison poured me my fourth cup of coffee and I declined a second offer of breakfast, my phone vibrated with a text.

_From: S Foster_

_Hey Opal says I need to apologise for what I said on the bus that night, she’s been bugging me about it ever since. Guess I could have been a bit more tactful. Still mean it though._

I glanced at the time displayed on the screen. It was barely 6 in the morning.

_From: Simon Jones_

_Why in god’s name are you awake??_

_From: S Foster_

_Why are you??_

_From: Simon Jones_

_For all you know, you just woke me up_

_From: S Foster_

_Well then I’d be pretty impressed with how well you can type while half-asleep. Why awake??_

I frowned at my phone. As cool as Foster seemed to be, there was no way I was telling her about my psycho autoasphyxiation dream. Hell, I didn’t think I was going to tell my amnesia councillor guy at the hospital. There were somethings you just couldn’t tell people about.

My phone buzzed again, interrupting my downward spiral of thoughts.

_From: S Foster_

_My girlfriend is a jerk who couldn’t find her car keys this morning and woke me up because she is the worst._

Before I could think of how to reply, I got another message a second later.

_From: S Foster_

_Also if you need anything, give me a shout, I’m off work today so don’t worry about being an inconvenience or anything._

I texted back to say thank you and then ordered breakfast; somehow I was feeling hungry again.

By the time I finished eating, it was a far more reasonable hour, so I finally went grocery shopping.

I picked the one closest to my apartment out of sheer laziness. It was fairly small, but I didn’t feel like having to carry anything too far.

Shopping in itself was a pretty weird experience. If I made an effort to not think too hard, my body would just gravitate towards certain parts of the store and occasionally even put things into my cart without meaning to. I guessed that meant I had gone to that store at least a few times.

It turned out that I must have been a pretty picky eater, or had some serious hidden chef skills, since the food I didn’t think about was all raw vegetables and fruit and other unprocessed things, like oats and uncooked rice. Pre-amnesia me must have spent a lot of time in the kitchen. Without friends, internet or a TV I guessed I must not have had much else to do. But that sounded like a hell of a lot of work, so I added a bunch of cereal, granola bars and frozen waffles and other readymade products.

It was lucky that I had picked a store close by given the sheer mass of food I purchased was kind of ridiculous; there was no way I would have managed to get it all home if I had more than two blocks  to go.

On block number 2, I tripped spectacularly over my own feet and fell on my face, groceries going in every direction. Amazingly, there was very little damage to them. The same could not be said for my clothing.

I’d ripped an enormous hole in the knee of my jeans and partially ripped part of the hem of them off on one leg. My pants had gone past what could be considered ‘fashionable’ right into ‘homeless’. My shirt hadn’t fared much better, with dirt smeared from wrist to shoulder on the side I’d fallen on, and a button having popped off in the confusion. My stitches throbbed in anger at their mistreatment, and I lay there stunned as my brain took stock of what happened.

I slowly sat up, making a face at my stinging, scraped raw hands. Upon inspection it looked like the sole of my beat-up sneaker had peeled away from the toe of my shoe, which was probably what tripped me.

I didn’t bother standing up, just pulled my phone out while sitting on the ground, in a circumference of strewn groceries. Pedestrians circled me and very carefully didn’t look at me, as you did with probable crazy people when you lived in a large city.

It was turning out to be a real fantastic day. Luckily I had a solution. I texted Foster.

_From: Simon Jones_

_Hey wanna do me a favour and come shopping with me?_

I gathered up my slightly bruised groceries and shuffled home to put them away. The sole of my broken shoe flapped with every step I took, threatening to trip me a second time. It was kind of tempting to just take it off and walk barefoot home, but the ground was really gross looking, so I struggled through.

I didn’t get a reply until after I finally staggered home and put all of my groceries away and took a very quick shower since the water wouldn’t heat up past vaguely lukewarm

_From: S Foster_

_You do realize it’s like 8 in the morning right?_

_From: S Foster_

_But hey I guess the early bird gets the best deals. Sure, why not_

We agreed to meet at my place and leave from there, since in Foster’s own words, she wasn’t the best at giving directions. I killed some time having second breakfast since I was hungry again and I took great pleasure in throwing out the homeless man pants since there was no way I was ever wearing those again.

I decided that if I was getting new clothing, I should probably consolidate all of what I already had into one drawer, to save space. Halfway through this goal, I stopped. Why was I keeping any of this stuff? I had the funds and it wasn’t like I liked any of it. Why didn’t I donate it, or more likely, throw it out? It wasn’t like holding onto this stuff would help me find any leads to my past.

What would pre-amnesia Simon think about that?

I shook my head and dropped the clothing on the floor, exasperated.

I was that Simon and I was this Simon, because we were one person.

It was just clothing.

But I still didn’t throw any of it out. Just in case I didn’t end up buying anything. That was my reason, and I was sticking to it.

Before I could throw myself into another existential crisis over throwing out my shitty razor or something equally stupid, Foster arrived.

“Wow, you weren’t lying when you said this place was a shithole,” was the first thing she said when she stepped inside. I rolled my eyes and shoved my wallet and phone into my pockets. Something prompted me to shove the gemstone into my pocket too, for no real reason. Maybe it could be my good luck charm. It had been sitting out in the slightly cool room, but felt comfortingly warm through the pocket of my jeans.

“Gee, tell me what you really think,” I said, slightly hurt. I’d spent some quality time throwing boxes out and not leaving shit on the floor, so it looked less awful than it had when I’d first gotten out of the hospital. After this morning’s shopping trip, there was even fruit in a bowl on the card table.

Foster shrugged ambivalently and asked, “So what did you need to go shopping for?”

“I currently own four shirts and two pairs of pants and no shoes,” I told her, “So basically everything.”

Foster glanced at my shoes, which were sitting next to the door. The sole of the left one was peeled off halfway, the heels on both of them worn down enough you could poke a finger through them into the inside of the shoe, if you tried hard enough.

Foster took one look at them and said, “Let’s start with shoes.”

She took me to a mall that was only a few blocks away and was just opening when we arrived. We were the first customers to enter the shoe store, much to its sole employee’s surprise.

Without specific intent, I wandered through the store slowly, Foster idly following in my wake. I picked up a pair of athletic runners that looked kind of like the trashed ones I was wearing.

“Those look... sensible,” Foster said, obviously trying to sound polite. Mostly she sounded like she failing at not being judgemental. To be honest, I doubted she was trying particularly hard.

“Not exactly a compliment,” I replied and put the shoe back. The whole point of this was to be me, not whoever I thought I was supposed to be. I was a grown ass adult who could pick his own shoes. I could wear whatever I wanted, damnit.

The next pair I picked up were lilac coloured and pretty rad in my opinion. I wondered vaguely if I was trying to be the least like my past self as I could, down to clothing and then quickly and pointedly didn’t think about that again. I liked colour. That was it.

“I’m pretty sure those are women’s shoes,” Foster observed in amusement.

I looked closer at the tag and frowned in dismay; she was right.

“Why does men’s clothing have to be so boring?” I asked Foster in mock dismay, except also kind of not. I was seriously not interested in buying more boring monochrome clothing.

She snorted. “Hey chill, maybe you can just get a really, really big size?” She suggested, rooting around near the bottom of the shelf where the largest sizes were.

“Foster, I’m like nine feet tall. My feet are basically the size of small boats. I doubt they have any women’s shoes that would fit me,” I said with regret.

“Oh right. Well maybe they have something similar but for guys?” She said and looked around for the only employee in the store. “Hey you!” She called to the guy, who was half asleep behind the register. “Yeah you. Dude, you’re the only guy who works here, who else would I be talking to? You got any men’s shoes that aren’t boring as hell?”

“Probably?” Kevin, going by the crooked name tag pinned to his shirt, said, sounding a bit lost. I didn’t blame him. Foster was a force to be reckoned with this early in the morning at the start of your shift.

Kevin was kind enough to show us the back corner of the store where there were a plethora of converse shoes in a rainbow of colours, and then immediately disappeared again. Foster was kind of intimidating, so I didn’t mind.

Happily enough, there was a pair in lilac that fit me. They weren’t as sweet as the other pair, but beggars couldn’t be choosers and they were at least ten steps up from the athletic ones.

“You know...” Foster said, her voice just as carefully polite as it had been ever since we’d gotten to the mall. She wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “Sorry, Opal told me I should ‘be gentle’ with you but that just isn’t me, so here goes: just because you don’t want to be whoever you think you used to be doesn’t mean you have to be the exact opposite.”

I blinked down at the shoes in my hand and said “It’s just clothing, Foster.”

“Right. And you didn’t pick those shoes because they’re nothing like the stuff you already own, right? I’m just saying there’s a middle ground between ‘fuck that guy’ and ‘I am that guy’. You’ve been kinda flip flopping between both and never anything in between.”

“It’s just hard,” I said, face turned to the shoes in my hands and not Foster’s grim expression. “Because the more I figure out about who I used to be the less I like him, but at the same time... well it’s not like I know who I am, do I? You can’t exactly define your entire personhood as being ‘not that guy’.”

“You could just stick with being who you are,” Foster said dryly.

“What?”

“Just because you don’t know your past doesn’t mean you don’t have a personality,” Foster said slowly, the words ‘you idiot’ going unspoken. “So just be you.”

“Somehow I feel like I might have been a really big moron about things,” I said very calmly. I might have been having a revelation but I wasn’t quite sure _what_ exactly I was realizing.

“That’s enough philosophy in this shopping trip,” Foster said and steered me towards the dress shoe section. “Every person on the planet needs dress shoes, so pick some out, chop chop.”

At her insistence, I picked out a pair of tan coloured wingtips, mind still stuck on our last conversation.

“Those aren’t going to be cheap,” Foster noted, eyeing the tag that stated that the shoes were ‘made with real leather’. The unspoken question of ‘are you sure you can afford this’ came through loud and clear. It seemed oddly out of character for her not to just ask me; Foster was a pretty blunt and straightforward person.

“I have a shitload of money,” I told her as Kevin bagged my dress shoes. I was wearing the purple ones. I was going to enjoy tossing my old ones out; the flapping sole on the left one had gotten real annoying real quick. “I have no idea how I made it, but I can afford to buy a whole lot of shoes without having to even begin to worry.”

“Huh,” Foster said, eyebrows raised, “Guess you’ll be buying lunch then.”

“Clothing first,” I argued, “I’m sick of looking like a homeless drug addict.”

“Coffee first,” Foster argued, “Now that you have shoes that actually stay on your feet, I need caffeine.”

I pouted, but obligingly took her to the coffee shop close to the entrance of the mall.

She ordered us some sort of froofy coffee drinks and brought them over to a table I’d claimed in the back corner.

“Bleh,” I said, making a face at the cup. Turned out I didn’t like sugary coffee drinks. It tasted overly saccharine and just plain awful. The coffee at _Flo’s_ was better, and even I, a person with only a few weeks’ worth of memories, knew that stuff wasn’t exactly top shelf quality.

“Oh give that here,” Foster said, snatching up my cup. “No need for it to go to waste, you plebeian.”

“Why do you have the day off work?” I asked, the question only just then occurring to me. It was the middle of the work week, most people would be working, as evidenced by the lack of other shoppers at the mall. The fact that it was still before noon probably didn’t help either.

“Client cancelled at the last minute, and I was out of busy work to do, so the boss said everyone should take a few days off,” Foster explained and at my curious expression she added, “I work for an interior decorating company. We just finished a big project, and we’re a small company, so we don’t have many ongoing projects at the moment.”

“That does explain your house,” I said, thinking about how nicely everything had matched and how comfortable it had been, despite the limited space.

“Are you going to get a job?” Foster asked in reply.

I shrugged; it had been a question I’d asked myself a few times in the last few days too. I hardly needed the money, but I did need to find a way to spend my time at least. The whole lack of a single memory of any previous job was a real stumbling block, though.

“You should,” she said. “Even if you’re loaded, sitting in your shithole apartment all the time is a good way to go crazy.”

I nodded in agreement, thinking about my fantastic start I’d had this morning. And every other day I’d spent at home that week.

“You should probably just get a new apartment,” she added as she finished the first cup of coffee and reached for my abandoned one.

“No,” I said instantly.

“You’ve already figured out that holding onto it isn’t going to help you remember,” she pointed out, “You said so yourself.”

“Just no,” I repeated. Even if I wasn’t waffling over my own identity, keeping the apartment was the right choice. What if someone tried to track me down but couldn’t find me because I left? The fact that it hadn’t happened yet didn’t necessarily mean anything...

Foster didn’t try and drag any more answers out of me and just finished her second coffee and then took me to a clothing store.

Shopping for clothing was more fun than buying shoes mostly because you could get men’s clothing that wasn’t black or grey, except for pants. Pants shopping was a real drag.

“How are you so tall?” Foster asked after I showed her the latest pair. Roughly an inch of my ankles were showing and the pants were only staying up because I was holding them up by the waistband since the hips and thighs were so large on me.

“This is ridiculous,” she muttered with a scowl. We had been in the pants section for a good long while by that point and both of us were rapidly losing patience, something neither of us had in abundance.

It was weird though, going through the motions of trying to find pants that were long enough for me was oddly familiar. It was completely absurd, the first thing that ever felt like I remembered it, or should remember, was buying pants. I could almost picture it, someone standing next to me, rolling their eyes at me and tossing aside rejected clothing. They were nearly as tall as me- and dark haired? The joke had always been that finding pants for them was nearly as onerous…

“Seriously, stop being so damn tall, this is completely obnoxious of you,” Foster said, completely destroying my concentration. The memory of another person disintegrated completely in my mind.

“Maybe I should just wear shorts forever,” I said slowly, the words carrying an odd weight to them, like I’d said them many times before.

“No,” Foster said with a determined gleam in her eyes, “If I can find clothing that isn’t made for children and fits me, we can find you pants.” She flagged down the nearest worker. “So this guy is basically a giraffe, do you have any pants that will fit him?”

“Have you tried the ‘tall’ section?” The salesgirl asked boredly. Her pure white eyes contrasted strikingly with her nearly coal black skin and hair.

“The ones he has on _are_ from there,” Foster said despairingly.

Both women looked at my legs; the salesgirl thoughtfully, Foster like my legs had personally offended her.

They set off to find me pants while I stayed where I was and waited patiently. The back of my neck prickled, like someone was watching me. I whipped around, expecting to see a store employee or something at the end of the aisle, but I was alone. I was seriously going crazy. First getting déjà vu over pants, then thinking someone was stalking me in a clothing store, my mental state was just being flushed right down the toilet with this damn shopping trip.

It took a bit of doing, but soon I was the proud owner of pants that fit (tragically plain black, but at least they were long enough), several plain t-shirts, a marvelous, _warm_ forest green pea coat,  a matching hat and scarf, socks and underwear that weren’t falling apart, and a crop top. The last had been Foster’s idea of a joke, but then I’d actually really liked the thing, so I’d bought it, to her chagrin.

“You look like an eight-foot tall twink,” she bemoaned as we left the store, “Opal is never going to stop making fun of me for letting this happen.”

“I won’t wear the crop top around her, she’ll never have to know,” I said, trying to console her.

Foster rolled her eyes. “Simon. You’re wearing lavender shoes and a shirt with kittens printed on it. Like that would help.”

I clutched my shopping bags protectively to my chest. The clothing I’d bought was _cute_ , Foster’s skills in interior decorating clearly didn’t extend to clothing.

“Hey,” she said as we neared the exit of the mall, “Do you mind if I stop to reschedule a hair appointment? I was supposed to go last week, but I got caught up at work.”

“Why don’t you just get it done now?” I asked “It’s the middle of the day, maybe they’ll have an opening?”

“Huh. Good point. You don’t mind?” She asked.

I fingered the ends of my long hair thoughtfully and said, “Nah, it’s cool. Maybe I could get something done too.”

“Oh lord, you’re going to dye your hair pink,” Foster said despairingly.

“Please, like I’d do that,” I replied, a little stung.

Actually I got a couple bright blue streaks put in, but not my whole head. That would have been ridiculous.

“What in god’s name have you been doing to this poor hair?” The stylist asked me once Foster and I were sat down.

“I honestly have no idea,” I said. From the next chair over, Foster snorted loudly and got lectured by her stylist about staying still.

“I’m going to introduce you to your newest friend, Mr. Conditioner. You are going to be BFFs,” my stylist said, brandishing a yellow bottle in my face.

“Hi Mr. Conditioner,” I said, a bit warily. Foster started to laugh outright, much to the despair of the woman attempting to trim her hair.

The whole experience was nice enough, until the stylist ran their fingers through my hair, just behind my ear and my whole body froze. I knew I remembered someone doing that for me, I just couldn’t remember remembering.

On the one hand, it was nice to actually be getting something back, like the doctor had said might happen, but on the other it was completely _useless_ in terms of actually regaining memories.

By the time we left the salon, I felt like a new person. The stylist hadn’t taken off much, just the ends where my hair had begun to split, but the conditioner had made a world of a difference. I was also pretty happy with the blue streaks, even if Foster said I was starting to look like pastel Rainbow Brite.

All in all, I looked nothing like the Simon who’d been fished out of a river. I didn’t care if I ever recovered my memories, I wasn’t going to go back to being exactly like he was. I was going to have fun and have friends and look after myself properly. Maybe if I remembered things my personality would change somewhat, but I couldn’t see how I could completely ignore how easily I’d made myself happier.

After Foster and I separated, I decided to take a kind of roundabout route home since it was pretty sunny and nice out. Twice, I felt that same prickle on the back of my neck like I had at the mall, but both times there was no one even looking at me, just a bunch of ordinary pedestrians minding their own business. After it happened a third time I decided to cut my little outing and just head home before I went completely nuts. Or gave myself a crick in my neck from whipping my head around like that.

I was nearly home when I accidentally nearly knocked someone into traffic.

I reacted without thinking, dropping all of my bags and lunging to grab her. My hands grabbed on to her wrist and shoulder. It was a battle against gravity and I leant back hard to prevent her from tumbling off the sidewalk and into the busy street and nearly knocked us both down in the opposite direction.

“Oh my god I’m so sorry,” I said to the woman, “are you okay?”

She frowned at me, her green eyes narrowing in irritation. She was clearly displeased about nearly dying because I was too stupid to pay attention to my surroundings.

“I am uninjured,” she said after a lengthy pause. Her voice was deep and rich and thick with a strange accent I couldn’t place.

I quickly ducked down to retrieve the large purse she’d dropped and handed it to her. She dipped her head in thanks gravely, like a queen pardoning a flea-bitten serf.

“I really am sorry, it was all my fault for not paying attention properly,” I added as I gathered up my own fallen bags. As I straightened, arms full, her eyes latched onto my face and her frown deepened.

She opened her mouth and asked me a question that made my heart stop:

“Do I know you?”


	4. Chapter 4

“M-maybe?” I managed to stammer out. My heart was pounding, my mind racing a mile a minute. Who was this woman? Did she know me? Maybe she was a friend or a cousin or a thousand other possibilities.

“My name is Simon Jones,” I added when the woman didn’t reply and just stared at me intently.

I shifted uncomfortably, unsure of what to say next. The air around us felt charged and heavy, like the feeling right before a thunderstorm breaks and unleashes a crack of thunder and sheets of rain. It felt as if everything around us was poised on the edge and just waiting for a single nudge to tumble into chaos and it made it difficult to breath.

Just as I was willing up the courage to ask her, there was a loud, shrill beeping, like a phone was going off. She blinked, shaking her head sharply, like she was waking out of a trance.

“I am afraid that name is unfamiliar to me,” she said, “I must have been mistaken. You resemble someone I am familiar with. Excuse me, I have several pressing engagements to attend to.”

Before I could ask her if she was sure, or who I looked like or what her name was or _anything_ , she was hurrying down the street and was quickly engulfed by the mass of pedestrians heading in every direction.

The good feeling that had been brewing throughout my morning with Foster disintegrated like tissue paper in water.

Things didn’t improve when I got home. My door was open. It hadn’t been like that when I’d left.

The door was pushed shut, but wasn’t fully latched, since that required slamming it shut just so. I knew I remembered slamming it shut and locking it; Foster had made fun of me for needing to put my back into it.

The safest thing to do would probably have been to call the police, or to at least contact Officer Nikolaidis. Whoever had broken in could have been still be inside. But some part of me was telling me I had to get in there and save whatever valuables hadn’t been stolen. The gemstone was a heavy weight in my pocket, but my thoughts drifted to the letter I’d left behind.

So instead of doing the sensible thing, I carefully pushed the door open.

My heart was in my mouth as I stepped inside as quietly as I could. I was met with a disaster. All of my carefully stored groceries had been pulled off the shelf and scattered along with everything else. My shitty table had been knocked over hard enough to create a large crack down the middle, the bar stool had been discarded carelessly in a corner.

I stood very still and strained my ears, trying to tell if anyone was waiting for me in my bedroom. Nothing moved, the only sound I heard was the muted noises coming from my neighbour’s apartments. After a long moment, I dared to go into the next room. This was a really stupid idea.

My bedroom was even worse than the kitchen. Two of my three drawers had been yanked open, their meager contents dumped on the floor. My bed had seen the worst of it; not only missing the sheets but the mattress had been ripped open with a knife. Stuffing and bits of fabric littered the floor around it. Someone had tossed my toiletries out of the bathroom; they were laying on the floor of the doorway, one bottle cracked open and oozing.

Whoever had done this had been seriously angry, and possibly looking for something.

I found my laptop in its case among the tangled mess of blankets that had been torn from my mattress. It was completely unscathed.

Why would someone break in and destroy everything and not take the single thing of value?

Because they weren’t after money. They had to be after me.

The bathroom door creaked open, like it had that morning and nearly gave me a heart attack.

That was it; I was leaving. I’d find a hotel room or something and call Officer Nikolaidis. It probably made more sense to wait for him and the police there at the apartment, but I couldn’t stand the thought of staying. What if whoever did this returned? I grabbed my bags of new clothing and my laptop case and marched out of the bedroom.

I was nearly to the door when I remembered the letter, half the reason I’d gone inside. I turned on my heel and I dug through the remains of my bedding, remembering I’d left it on my bed that morning. It wasn’t there, nor was it between the frame of the bed and the wall, or on the floor under the bed. It had been taken.

Heart pounding, I wheeled around, eyes darting everywhere. It wasn’t here. My eyes landed on the set of drawers, specifically on the jammed bottom drawer. There was no reason to think it would be there. I parked my ass down in front of it anyways.

The drawer was stubborn and unwilling to move as I yanked on it. My hands struggled to find purchase on the cheap particle board, sliding over the inside of the drawer.

“Goddamnit,” I hissed and pressed my fingers in deeper to the drawer, hoping to find a better grip.

Something sharp and electric zinged down my fingers and I yanked my hand back. It had been like a static electricity charge, but different. Had I touched a loose wire or something? Inside of a drawer. Yeah, that made sense.

I crouched down and, using the light on my phone, peered into dark of the drawer. There, where my fingers had touched, was a small symbol, carved into the side of the drawer.

Hesitantly, I poked the symbol, expecting nothing. The strange static feeling came again, not unpleasant, but odd nonetheless.

“Come on, open,” I said and, with my fingers on the symbol, yanked on the drawer. My hands tingled all the way up to my shoulders, nearly enough to make me let go.

It slid open easily, like a hot knife through butter and came out of the set of drawers entirely.

I would have marvelled at that, only I was too busy noticing that I’d just found a secret compartment.

It was built into the floor of the apartment, only visible when the bottom drawer was fully removed. Carefully, I pulled out three books and a stack of familiar looking letters. The books were ornate and covered in scrolling symbols I didn’t recognize. I flipped through one, noting the glint of gold on the edges of the pages. The book was blank.

Upon closer inspection, all of the books were blank.

There wasn’t the time for this. Something was telling me I had to get out of there immediately. Maybe it was the destroyed bed or the fact that I suspected someone was looking to kidnap or murder me. Or that I’d just found a literal secret compartment in my otherwise shitty but ordinary apartment.

I shoved the books and letters into one of my shopping bags and then grabbed the coded journals too, figuring they might also be important.

Outside, the feeling of impending danger didn’t go away, only diminished slightly. I jogged two blocks to where I’d previously noticed a hotel being. The feeling of danger didn’t abate, so I kept going for another ten blocks. At that point it felt like my arms were about to fall off, given my heavy burden. I stopped on the spot and dropped half the bags, sagging against the closest building.

What was I doing? It felt like bees were buzzing between the layers of my skin, frantic and angry. I needed to keep moving, but I also needed to stay still for another moment longer, sucking in desperate gasps of air.

What in god’s name had I been doing before I’d lost my memories? The letter and the coded journals could have been written off as the workings of a rather eccentric and bored young man. The secret compartment was something else entirely. And the fact that I suspected that someone had broken into my apartment looking for me.

I couldn’t stay where I was, out in the open in the middle of the city. My next step was to find somewhere safe and private to drop my bags off and then call the police. Standing around would do me no good.

Before I could even finish willing up the energy to pick up my bags and keep moving, someone grabbed me by the shoulders and slammed me into the wall I was leaning on.

“What the h-” I wheeze, winded from the rough treatment.

“What in the nine hells are you doing here? You said you’d leave immediately, you brainless idiot!” The man holding me by the shoulders snapped, hazel eyes flashing with anger. The man several inches shorter than me, but a whole lot stronger, going by the corded muscles in his forearms. He had wildly curly red hair a massive amount of freckles and an angular face that didn’t look like he smiled much, though I might have been biased due to him violently pining me against a wall and glowering at me threateningly.

“What?” I managed to squeak out, lungs still struggling to regain their normal function.

“It’s been over a fortnight, how the hell are you not dead? Dassa’s tits, what were you thinking?” He demanded and then, noticing that he was still pinning me to a wall, let go of my shirt, but didn’t move out of my personal space or stop glaring at me.

“Um, this is going to sound crazy, but I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about. Because I have amnesia. My oldest memories are only from a few weeks ago,” I said.

The man’s angry look slowly melted into disbelief followed by horrified realization.

“Should I know you? What’s your name?” I asked for good measure, when it seemed like he wasn’t about to actually explain anything.

“I’m Ross. And yeah you could say you should know me,” He said with a bitter laugh. He sighed and then glanced around, eyes darting quickly. “We should get out of here, it’s a miracle no one’s caught up to you yet.”

“Well, not quite,” I muttered.

Ross seized me roughly by the upper arms, eyes boring into mine. “What do you mean? Who found you?”

“Who is ‘they’?” I countered.

Ross glowered at me and said, “Look, either I can explain everything right now, here out in the open where anyone can find us, or we can go somewhere safe where you have a less chance of being killed _and_ I can explain everything.”

“Killed?” I squeaked. Sure my apartment had been broken into and I was still plenty freaked out and scared, but it was a huge leap from that to actual death. What the hell had I gotten myself into?

“Killed,” Ross agreed, face stone cold sober.

“Why should I trust you?” I demanded, a frown creeping onto my face. My apartment was broken into, my life apparently in danger, going along with a stranger seemed like a bad idea, even if it seemed like he actually knew me.

“That’s your choice. If you don’t remember me, or your own past there’s nothing I can say to convince you. All I can say is: I swear I won’t hurt you,” He said. His hazel eyes were less angry than before, but still fierce looking, matching his determined expression.

I paused. Realistically, he was right.

“Okay. I’ll go with you,” I said, gathering up my bags.

Ross looked surprised, but led me down a warren of increasingly small and dingy alleyways at a rapid pace. We didn’t see a soul as we made our way deeper into the heart of the city. Several times Ross stopped us to peer around a corner, silently assessing, before gesturing for me to continue. I would have found it all rather silly, if it hadn’t been for the last time he did it.

That time, he jerked back and shoved me down to crouch between a dumpster and the wall of the building. I would have complained about the gross puddles of... something getting on my pants, but the fierce expression on his face made me stop short. Then I heard footsteps, slow and considering come around the corner we’d been at and approach our hiding spot. From the gap between the dumpster and the ground, I could see a pair of heavy, worn boots coming closer.

Silently, Ross mouthed a curse and began digging through his pockets.

The booted footsteps grew nearer, still at a languid pace, like the wearer had no care in the world and nothing to fear. Somehow the fact that they were so casual was what made my heart begin to pound and my hands to become sweaty against the handles of bags I was still clutching.

Triumphantly, Ross produced something from his jacket pocket. It was a photo. Before I could get a look at it, he pressed it to his forehead, image inward, eyes shut in concentration.

The footsteps stopped. The person was right next to the dumpster.

Abruptly, Ross took the photo and ripped it in half violently.

I heard the boot-wearer gasp, rocking back a step, and then took off running in the direction Ross and I had come from.

“We need to move quicker,” Ross hissed at me and stood once the person was out of earshot. “To the seventh hell with being subtle.”

I nodded and followed suit. Ross took off running, but I spared a moment to glance down at the photo he’d dropped in a puddle on the ground. It was of me. I ran after Ross before I could see what colour my eyes were in it.

We went much faster after that, running through the alleys and once even climbing up a fire escape and scrambling over the roof and then climbing down the fire escape of a second building attached to the first. That had been a heart-wrenching endeavor especially when the steps of the second fire escape had groaned alarmingly under our racing footsteps. We still didn’t see anyone, which somehow struck me as being improbable even if we were sticking to alleys with nothing but few windowless doors and dented dumpsters in them.

Just as I was about to tell Ross I couldn’t go a step farther without stopping to at least let me catch my breath, we stopped. Ross gestured me inside first so I trudged through the unremarkable door and down a set of stairs, still gasping for breath. I was seriously out of shape, at least compared to my companion. I kind of wanted to punch Ross for not so much as being a little sweaty after our fun parkour adventure. His footsteps were silent behind me as I all but fell down the stairs much more clumsily.

The stairs ended at another door, this one much more remarkable. It was covered in intricate indecipherable writing that covered nearly every inch of it and that almost looked like it was _glowing_. Ross unlocked that door with an ordinary looking key and preceded me into the room beyond. It was an ordinary looking apartment, albeit one without any windows or any personal belongings that I could see. It was also kind of musty smelling, and everything looked like it was covered in a thin layer of dust. Clearly no one had been inside in several weeks at the very least.

“We’ll be safe here, there are countermeasures for anyone trying to track you. After my little stunt behind the dumpster they won’t be look in this part of the city anyways, though they definitely know you’re alive now,” Ross said. He sat down on an easy chair, which let off an almost comical puff of dust. He sneezed violently and scrubbed at his face in irritation.

“What is this place?” I asked, blurting the newest question of the long list I had waiting. I hoped there was edible food in this place, because I had a lot of things that Ross needed to answer, and I was already hungry.

“An old safe house, I’m not the only one who knows about it, but it hasn’t been used in a long time, so it should be secure enough for a few hours and then we can move somewhere safer. We needed to get off the streets first, what I did only bought so much time,” Ross explained. I sat down next to him on the couch, angling my body towards him.

“I have a lot of questions,” I said after a pause, during which he looked expectantly at me, “But I don’t know where to start.”

“That’s fair,” Ross said, “I’m sure this is all confusing for you. But first you need to tell me what you meant when you said people might have caught up to you.”

I frowned. I’d come this far, so I figured I should just trust Ross, but there was a niggling fear about just trusting this complete stranger when I was apparently in danger. Still, he had probably hidden me from some unscrupulous jackbooted thug.

Reluctantly, I said, “Someone broke into my apartment. I think whoever did it was looking for me, they didn’t steal anything valuable, just a letter.”

“Was there anything else odd?”

My lips twisted. Explaining the feeling of dread I’d had in the apartment would probably make me sound crazy, but as I’d just come through a _magic door_ …

“It felt like I was being watched a couple times earlier today. And when I was in the apartment after the break in I felt like I had to get away, like not just because it had been broken into- I just _had_ to get away, like blocks away as fast as possible,” I said quickly, eyes not quite meeting Ross’s in case he told me I sounded insane.

“Probably whoever broke in also applied a spell to your apartment to keep unwanted people away, a very strong one if you felt like that even blocks away. But there’s no way of knowing who it was with only that much knowledge. There are only so many people capable of that level of magic, but you’ve managed to cross nearly every one of them at some point, so it could be any one of them,” Ross replied, looking pensive but not like I’d said anything especially crazy. It made me wonder what sort of life he led if all that could be taken in stride. By the sounds of it, I’d been leading a similar life. That was not a comforting thought.

“We should be safe enough here no matter who did it. Go ahead, what were your questions?” He asked, expression pensive. He looked a lot younger when his angular face wasn’t creased with anger or stress- I would have guessed him to only be a few years older than I was.

“Okay- to start with who was that in the alley, and why were we hiding from them?” I asked. At the time it had seemed completely necessary, like being seen by that individual would have meant the end of my life, but looking back I couldn’t see why. It had just been some dude walking down an alley. How had Ross been able to tell friend from foe so quickly? He’d barely stuck his around the corner before diving behind that dumpster and taking me with him.

“I’m not entirely certain, but I recognized the sound of those boots though- a trademark of the Durand family, so I knew we didn’t want to be seen,” he replied, rubbing a hand through his wild red hair, making it stand on end. “The break in could have been done by someone else, you have a lot of people after you, but the Durand Family is the most probable, especially in this city.”

“What’s the Durand Family? Why are they looking for me?” I asked. The way he said those two words together made it sound like he was referring to more than just a family. Those were capital letter words that were never separated, the way Ross said it made that obvious.

“That’s not a short story,” Ross said with a sigh. “You’ve been on the run from them since you were eighteen. I don’t know the specifics, rumours were running rampant at the time, and you never told me yourself, but the long and the short of it is that you’ve been enemy number one ever since then.

“After everything that happened a few weeks back, the Durand Family assumed you were dead, since the spell tracking you died and you didn’t visit your apartment, I’m guessing they assumed someone made off with your corpse, but that you were really dead. You must have done something to make them realize that you weren’t dead; the city is crawling with their people right now. More than usual anyways.”

“Okay,” I said agreeably, “But do you have any idea why these people want me dead? Who are they, who are you and why do you know all of this stuff?” I mentally added _and why should I trust you?_ I felt like I should trust Ross, especially after all the effort that seemingly went into rescuing me, but I refused to be blind about this whole thing. Just because I was missing the vast majority of my memories didn’t mean I was an idiot. Well, I hoped not. A real idiot wouldn’t realize he was being an idiot, I assumed.

Ross sighed again and rubbed a hand over his face. “Sorry,” he said, hand still pressed over his eyes. He removed his hand and sat forward, elbows resting on his knees and began to explain, “It’s just hard to get over the fact that you don’t know any of this stuff, it’s been your life for so many years at this point. You were once the person explaining some of this stuff to me. It’s weird to be on the opposite end of it.

“We met not long after you left Mria Yansi-” He started to explain, settling back into the couch.

“Okay, hold up who is that?” I interrupted, holding up one hand. Either Ross wasn’t very good at explaining things, or I was being an impatient little shit. Frankly if the second was true, I felt like I had good reason to be so.

“Right,” Ross said, hazel eyes widening, “You wouldn’t remember that either. I didn’t think. God, this is weird”

“Imagine how it feels to be me,” I replied dryly, “All I remember is waking up covered in blood in a river with a useless cellphone. I only got out of the hospital like two weeks ago. So please, please, just tell me in the least number of words necessary who Mria Yansi is and what this Durand Family and what do they all have to do with me?”

Ross nodded firmly, expression firming with resolve. “Okay. I can do that. Sorry. Mria Yansi is the city-state where you grew up. They’re home to a large population of mages, and fiercely protective of their knowledge, but also smack in the middle of a lot of powerful fae land, so they have dealings with the Durand Family to prevent being wiped off the map.

“You had to escape from there four years ago, for reasons I’m not too clear on. Their government has been looking for you ever since, not very successfully since their agents are unfamiliar with the world outside the walls of their city state.

“The Durand Family isn’t really an actual family, the most of members aren’t blood relatives. It’s more like a mob, but with magical ties. They have their fingers in every market you can imagine, but especially the magical black market. Most of the big cities with high fae populations like this one are under their control, Dassa only knows why you thought hiding here was a good idea. Their members are connected magically with a sort of web, as part of their initiation, it looks like a tattoo on their upper arms. So if you piss one of their members off, all of their people will know about you. Which you’ve managed to do several times, I might add.

 “Two weeks ago you contacted me asking for help. You said your latest safe house had been found out, you didn’t say if it was by the Durand Family or Mria Yansi. I met up with you to help you get out of the city, but people from the Durand Family caught up. We split up, you were going somewhere to teleport to safety, I was staying behind to slow the Family down, since they didn’t know I was on your side.”

“Wait, rewind, I can _teleport_?” I demanded. That sounded impossibly cool. When I thought about it, I could remember magic being a thing that existed, but not something _I_ could do. Apparently just another thing I’d lost with my memories. _Thanks_ , amnesia, super helpful.

“Oh,” Ross said, floored. He looked like someone had hit him on the back of the head with a bat and then yanked the rug right out from under his feet. “Right. You wouldn’t remember. You were a mage, trained in high magic in Mria Yansi. You learned low magic after you left.”

I frowned and closed my eyes, trying to remember. Somehow, I knew I knew at least a little on this subject. I wasn’t going to question it.

It was difficult; it felt like my memories were grains of sand slipping through my fingers the harder I tried to remember. High magic was hereditary, or maybe just treated like it was? It was different in every part of the world, and even between different families. It was done with spoken words and rituals. And weaving? I could remember seeing red threads being wound around gold ones, before the image slipped out of my grasp. I remembered that low magic was the kind anyone could do if they worked at it hard enough, and was usually based on plants and herbs.

My hands emptied. I was out of sand. I opened my eyes

“That’s unusual, right?” I asked.

Ross nodded, looking a little surprised. Probably because I’d told him I had no memories. Apparently that wasn’t entirely true. I also had contextless trivia knowledge on magic. That somehow seemed less useful than it sounded.

“Yes. You were trained in high magic while living in Mria Yansi, and picked up low magic afterwards since using major magic would have been dangerous while trying to stay hidden,” Ross said.

“Wouldn’t teleporting be high magic?” I asked with a frown. “What would the point be if people could find me if I used it?”

“I don’t know, there wasn’t much time. It had been your plan. I’m just telling you what you told me,” Ross replied with a sigh. His face was lined with an undercurrent of sadness, like there was something else worse that he wasn’t telling me. “I don’t know a lot about magic, it was never anything I had any talent in. Well aside from a few tricks, like the one I used when we nearly got caught.”

“The thing with my picture?” I asked.

“Yeah, it was a spell you invented a few years ago, very handy. The Durand Family uses specific spells for tracking and you found a way to trick it into fooling it into thinking people are in different locations. Until I used that, they probably weren’t sure if you’d escaped from the city or not, but my spell would have made them realize you are definitely alive and probably in the city if you’re leading them on a wild goose chase, but it was a better option than being caught.”

I nodded absently. As interesting as all of this was, it wasn’t what I really wanted to know about.

“Did I have any family?” I asked tentatively. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know. If what Ross was saying was true, I’d probably left them behind when I fled.

“As far as I know, both your parents and some of your grandparents are alive in Mria Yansi, or at least they were when you left the city four years ago,” Ross said.

“It was really weird to wake up not knowing anyone,” I said, casting my eyes downward. “Especially since no one seemed to know me. I thought I was a technophobic recluse since my name didn’t pop up anywhere online.”

“It was safer not to make friends,” Ross said sympathetically, “But as far as I know, you’ve only been in this city for about six months, and it was only somewhere to stay while your next long-term identity was being set up.”

“It must have been awful, being alone like that for so long,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself. It was like hearing a story about someone who wasn’t me. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking. Obviously when I’d been looking for hints of my past, I’d been hoping there was someone looking for me at the other end.

“Well in the first few years you weren’t alone,” Ross said, “I was with you whenever it was safe, mostly helping you set up whatever new identity you had. Sometimes you looked after my little brother Jaimie for me, when things were quieter and I needed to go somewhere he couldn’t. We both have contacts you would meet up with periodically for information and the like. And Tristan was with you for the first two years, until it got too dangerous for you to be in the same location.”

“Who?” I asked, my heart pounding. It felt like puzzle pieces were coming together, the picture almost visible but not quite finished enough for me to see the whole picture. Tristan. T. “Wait, is he the person who wrote the letter?”

“Oh god, of course you don’t remember Tristan,” Ross said, looking almost grief stricken. Then abruptly he froze, face going completely still.

“Wait what letter?” He asked, voice deadly calm in a way that frightened me to the quick.

“What letter?” He repeated and grabbed me roughly by the forearms again, fingers digging into my skin hard enough to bruise. I wanted to jerk out of his grip, but was too afraid to move.

Oh hell, what had I done trusting this man?


	5. Chapter 5

“The one I found in my apartment?” I said, voice shaking slightly. Ross was seriously scaring me. “It was the only thing missing when I went into my apartment after it had been broken into.”

“Why would you go into your apartment when you knew it had been broken into? Are you insane? What if someone had been still inside?” Ross demanded, only getting angrier, but let go of my arm.

Well. He wasn’t wrong. That was probably pretty dangerous. I’d known it had been a pretty stupid thing to do at the time, and that had been before I’d known I was a fugitive.

“I was going to phone the police,” I muttered defensively, rubbing at the sore spot on her arm. “I just wanted to see what had been stolen. Only, it was only the letter that had been taken. Everything else was still there, even my laptop.”

“You called the police?!”

For a guy that was maybe 5’6 and on the leaner end of things, Ross had quite the powerful voice. Before I could find my voice again, he sat back roughly and sighed deep and slow, grinding the palms of his hands into his eyes. He let his arms drop and looked at me, face still grim, but much less threatening.

“Sorry,” he said, much more calmly, though there was still a clear thread of panic in his voice. “I shouldn’t have shouted at you. You didn’t know any better. But this is very important, did you phone the police?”

“No,” I replied, a bit warily, “I had to get out of there first. Then I bumped into you, so I never got the chance to call Nikolaidis.”

“Who?” Ross asked, still looking worried and tense, like he was about to leap off the couch at any second.

“Officer Nikolaidis, he’s a friend of mine. Sort of. He was one of the cops who found me two weeks back,” I said. At this, Ross grew even tenser, his skin going pale under all of his freckles.

“The police found you that night? Why were they called?” He asked urgently.

“Well, being found sitting in a river covered in blood does tend to make people call the authorities,” I said.

“And you stayed? You should have known better,” Ross said and leapt up to pace the room at a rapid clip. Then he shook his head. “Fuck. Sorry, not your fault. Shit this is bad… How the hell are we both not dead yet?”

“Why in God’s name wouldn’t I trust the police?” I demanded. “I mean, the guy who found me screamed, so I screamed and everything was all very confusing and blurry. The police took me to a hospital and tried to find my family.”

Ross stopped mid-step and abruptly turned to face me. “And then what happened?”

“Um. Nikolaidis didn’t find anything, so my case got closed. He promised to keep trying in his own time though,” I replied warily.

Ross’s forehead wrinkled in concentration. “Nikolaidis?” He repeated. “That was his name?”

“Uh, yeah. There were other officers involved, I think. But he was the one in charge, I didn’t hear the names of the others, and Nikolaidis was the only one who ever spoke to me directly,” I said. Ross’s shoulders relaxed a little, but he didn’t sit down again, just resumed pacing, slower than before.

“Nikolaidis. I don’t recognize that name,” He muttered to himself.

“Why would you?” I asked. Ross didn’t look remotely like he was a police officer, and I doubted he could have been one, given he’d helped me in my past life as a fugitive. Or current life, I supposed, given I was hiding in a safe house of some sort after running away from some guy that was hunting me down. Yeah, I was totally still a fugitive. Even if I had very little idea what I’d done to become one.

“What did he look like?” Ross asked, completely ignoring my question. That was a seriously irritating quality of his.

All the same I replied, “Really tall, really muscular. Like ‘get into a fight with a tank and the tank loses’ sort of build. Kind of blue. I think he might be part Oceanid. He’s a pretty memorable guy.”

Ross shook his head but finally sat back down, mostly relaxed again. “Okay, it seems by some miracle the Durand Family must not have heard about you through the cops,” He said. “I have no idea how that happened, but I’m not going to question this gift from the havens.”

“The Durand Family are police officers? I thought you said they were some sort of crime syndicate.” I said with a frown.

“No, but they have people everywhere, especially in important places, like the police. They should have heard about a man matching your description being brought in and been suspicious, but somehow you must have slipped under the radar,” He said and rubbed a hand over his face in frustration. “That’s all but impossible, and a first for them, but I can’t think of how else to explain all this.”

“I’m really that important to them?” I asked quietly. It was frightening to think about; an entire mob organization out scouring the city just for me. And an entire city-state along with it, from the sounds of it. It was a definite ant versus boot sort of situation, one where the ant hadn’t even noticed the boot for several weeks.

“Yes,” Ross confirmed, “It’s going to be difficult to get you out of the city unnoticed. I’m going to have to count on one of them spotting us when we make our move. If we’re lucky I can play them off each other. They don’t get along, for all that they’re supposed to be allies, and they never seem to catch on to that strategy.”

“Why are you doing all of this for me?” I asked, a bit helplessly. Opal, Foster, Nikolaidis, even Alison the waitress and now Ross. Every person I’d encountered up till now had been kind to me and done more than was expected of them. I didn’t know if I was the luckiest bastard on the planet or the unluckiest.

Ross was silent for a very long moment, his dark eyes distant. After a drawn out moment, he finally spoke softly, his voice rough and low.

“You saved the life of my younger brother, Jaime. That’s something I can never repay. I owe you this and more,” he said, eyes flicking up to meet mine. He looked away again. I couldn’t help but wonder what he saw: his friend or a stranger.

“I also consider us to be friends, even if you don’t remember.” He flicked a glance at me, head to toe and added, with a small smirk that made his face look years younger. “Or look the same.”

I self-consciously touched the new blue streaks in my hair and said, “I wasn’t... happy with the impression I was getting of pre-amnesia me and I decided that even if I did get my memory back, I’d understand why I’d done it.”

“It’s certainly a... colourful look,” Ross said very diplomatically, “Not something anyone would expect.” His eyes glanced down at my bulging shopping bags strewn across the floor in front of the couch we were seated on.

“What’s in all of the bags?” He asked, nudging a bag with one toe, looking skeptical.

“Mostly new clothing,” I said and dug around in the one closest to me. “And somethings I found in the apartment that I thought I needed to protect.” I produced one of the coded journals and a couple of the yet unread letters. “Maybe you could tell me what some of this stuff is? It’s all been really mysterious and weird.”

Ross leant forward and took the journal from my hands and flipped through it.

“This is filled with spells you were creating when you were still living in Mria Yansi,” he explained. “I helped you encode them a year after you’d escaped and had a close call with the Durand Family.”

“Spells?” I echoed, “For what?”

Ross shrugged. “No clue. Like I said, I only know a few low magic spells you created. I didn’t understand any of the theoretical, technical stuff, I just helped make sure no one else would if they stole this stuff.” He paused consideringly and handed me back the journal. “They were done using a running key cipher- a type of vigenère cipher.”

“A what?” I asked, already lost.

“Uh,” Ross said, rubbing a hand through his bright red hair. It was already nearly standing on end, this only made it more staticy. It was kind of comical in contrast with his perpetually serious face. “It’s complicated. But basically you use each letter in a book to correspond to each letter in the thing you want to encode.  Does that make sense?”

“Not really,” I said honestly. Was it possible to lose IQ points along with your memory?

“That’s alright. The important part is that we used a different book for each journal, dull ones no one would think were important, but we’ll want to get them back before we leave the city, just in case someone catches on. That cipher isn’t perfect, and you were adamant that this information couldn’t be found by Mria Yansi. The cipher was mostly to buy time if anything was stolen so someone could steal it back.” Ross paused and then added with a small smile, “And to give a headache to anyone who stole them back from you. You always did have a sadistic streak, when it came to Mria Yansi”

“That does explain those books,” I said. At least I now knew I wasn’t actually the sort of guy to be interested in horse breeding. That just would have just been embarrassing.

Ross stopped rummaging through the bag and came up with some of the letters in one hand.

“There’s only two more journals in here, you used to have five total when I last saw you,” he said, eyes pinching together in worry, “Did you leave any behind?”

“No,” I said. I knew there had only been three when I’d gotten home from the hospital. “Do you mean these ones?” I asked, producing from another bag the ornate books I’d taken from the secret compartment in the floor.

Ross dropped the letters he’d been holding, like his fingers had somehow gone numb with shock.

“Are those what I think they are?” He asked, eyes wide, and very gently took the book out of my hands.

“I don’t know, they’re all blank,” I said, a bit confused. Sure they looked pretty and probably were worth a fortune given the jewels and shit on the covers but still, the coded journals seemed more valuable to me if I’d stolen them before going on the run for four years.

“If these are what I suspect they are, then they would be spelled to look blank until you used a certain phrase. Very old high magic,” he explained, eyes glued to the book in his hands, fingers gently caressing the cover.

“Wait,” he said, eyes falling back to the letters he’d dropped on the floor. A look of horror was dawning on his face as he picked one up, eyes flicking over the writing quickly. “You said before, a letter had been stolen?”

I nodded. “Yeah, it was the only thing missing. I think it was the same as those ones, I haven’t had a chance to read those ones yet.”

Ross unceremoniously dumped the supposedly priceless book on the floor and letter along with it and leapt to his feet.

“Shit!” He hissed and grabbed the leather coat he’d left on the floor. “Whoever has it can use it to track you, possibly through these wards. We need to leave ASAP. Tristan you sentimental little pain in the ass...”

“Right now?” I asked, getting to my feet. I’d really hoped there would have been time for me to eat something or maybe take a nap. This day was really catching up to me now that I’d had a chance to sit down for a few minutes, I was almost feeling a bit dizzy.

“No,” Ross said, heading for the door. “I need to arrange a few things first. We’ll leave tonight.”

He pinned me with a stare. “If anyone comes to the door, don’t open it. If they break in, run. If you can’t run, hide. If you can’t do either of those things, I have one spell that you can use to protect yourself- but only use it as a last resort, it’s only good for one use, so run like hell if you use it. But only as an absolute last resort. Swear to me that you won’t just decide to stand in fight.”

“I swear,” I said, glowering a little. Honestly, what sort of person did Ross know me as? I knew I was good as dead if any of these dangerous people caught me, expecting an experienced mage and wanted fugitive instead of a clueless amnesiac.

“It’s the most basic high magic spell you ever used. All you have to do is say _dura claudiac_ and focus on imagining pulling a knot tight while holding this,” he said and handed over what looked like an ordinary piece of glass, but the world seen through it looked warped and slightly red-tinted. Somehow, I didn’t like the idea of touching it.

I gave him a look that said a thousand words on what I thought about this.

“I’m serious,” he said irritably, shrugging into his coat with sharp, efficient motions. “It sounds stupid, I know, but that’s how you described it to me. Take it.”

I begrudgingly took the glass and stuck it into a pocket. Given how serious Ross looked I doubted he was screwing with me, but seriously it sounded completely fake.

“Don’t open that door,” he repeated, like I was an idiot.

Before I could reply, he was out the door.

I carefully sat down. I was feeling kind of shaky.

Okay so what had I learned? I was secretly magic, and also being hunted by two dangerous factions, possibly more, and one of them nearly succeeded in catching me two weeks ago. Also the journals and books I’d taken out of my apartment were very valuable and likely what lead to be being a wanted man, but the books I’d left behind were also important.

Would Ross have time to get those books? He’d said there were things to arrange, but did that include those books?

I’d ask him about it when he got back, maybe we could get them before we left to go wherever it was that was we were going. He’d thought they were important, so leaving them where this Durand Family could get at them didn’t seem like a good idea. Or the Mria Yansi, whatever they really were. Ross really needed to explain things for me, I felt like I’d gotten a five minute crash course and hadn’t really learnt much of anything.

I’d learned that I was magic, but not how to use it, aside from a thirty second tutorial on how to use a piece of glass. I’d learned I had a family, but nothing about them. I learned that a whole lot of people were out to get me, but not why. Aside from the fact that I’d pissed them off a whole lot, and frequently.

Thanks, Ross.

It wasn’t his fault, I knew that. My safety was more important than figuring out what the hell was going on. That didn’t stop me from being completely irritated as hell.

When we got somewhere safe I was going to sit on Ross until he explained everything down to the excruciating details. He had to know more about my past than he’d said.

There was a knock on the door.

I froze.

If it was Ross, he could have just come back inside; he had the key. It couldn’t be him. It had barely been ten minutes. He had said others knew about this place. He hadn’t said if those people were friendly or not. I was betting on not.

I got up off the couch and inched away from the door soundlessly. There might be another way out of the place; I couldn’t count on whoever was out there being not out to get me

“Ross I know you’re in there!” A feminine sounding voice shouted through the door.

Okay, this person knew Ross. Did that make them an ally? What if it was just someone who knew that I knew Ross and was using that?

Wait, that was stupid, no one who was after me knew I didn’t have my memories, they’d think I knew who to trust and who not to trust.

That didn’t matter, Ross had said not to open the door so even if it was my own mother I wasn’t opening the door.

“Ross, if you don’t open this door, I’ll break it down!”

As quietly as I could, I investigated the rest of the apartment, looking for an exit. Ross had said to try to run first, so that was my plan. Even if Ross hadn’t said what to do once I’d stopped running. How would he find me again? I’s just have to hope he could hunt me down again.

I was pretty sure we were in a basement, given the lack of windows, but I had to hope anyways. The first room I tried was a tiny bathroom, the second a closet. Neither had any windows. There was one last room to try, probably a bedroom.

“I warned you!” The voice shouted, sounding darkly amused. There was a loud buzzing that seemed to be coming from the front door itself and made me want to slap my hands over my ears. It seemed to almost rattle my brain and crawl right under my skin, but I grit my teeth and opened the third door just as the front door began to emit tendrils of foul smelling smoke.

I was right; it was a bedroom, shockingly large for the size of the rest of the apartment. At the opposite end was a tiny window near the ceiling. I’d probably fit through. Maybe. I’d have to fit.

I raced to the window and reached up. I was tall enough to reach it, but not enough to be able to pull my entire body through. Wildly, I looked around for something to stand on. The only furniture in the room was a bed, much too heavy to easily move. I raced back into the main room on silent feet to grab a chair from the kitchen. There, I spotted the pile of bags by the couch.

Shit.

I couldn’t leave them here. But I also couldn’t take all of them with me, if I wanted to get away quickly and unnoticed. I also couldn’t count on whoever was breaking in not to steal them.

The smoke was getting thick in the room, making my eyes burn and tear. Coughing, I grabbed the bags and dragged them into the bedroom along with the chair.

I’d have to come back for them. If this woman was looking for Ross, maybe she wouldn’t search the place top to bottom. It looked pretty abandoned, so why waste time?

I shoved the bags as far under the bed as they’d go. Then I reconsidered and grabbed the books and emptied a bag of clothing to put them in. They wouldn’t all fit; they were too heavy and would just rip the bag open. I left the journals behind. If the ornate spellbooks were as old as Ross said, they were probably more valuable. I piled the clothing on top of the remaining books, a pathetic hiding spot but I was running out of time. The air in the bedroom was starting to get uncomfortably thick with smoke and it was like breathing tar.

From the main room, there was a loud cracking noise. It almost sounded like bones breaking violently, sharp but also somehow _wet_.

Giving the bed one last look, I thought fiercely _don’t find get found_.

_Snick._

I blinked at the bed in confusion. It had felt like-like I’d pulled a knot in a string tight. Like Ross had said.

I didn’t have time to consider this further. I shoved the chair under the window and hauled myself up. The window was made of a single sheet of glass without any mechanisms to push it open. The glass was thick enough to blur the outside world to indecipherable blurs of colour. How the hell was I supposed to break that?

The smoke was getting almost impossible to breath. Coughing, I hefted my bag of books. They felt insubstantial compared to the heavy duty glass before me.

I smashed the books into the glass as hard as I could. A very small crack in the glass formed where the corn of the top book had struck.

There was another loud bone cracking sound from the main room, and somehow the room _lurched_ like an animal in pain.

_I’m going to break the glass with this_ , I thought desperately and swung the books again. _Snick_.

The glass dissolved into dust, showering me head to toe.

I stared at the books disbelievingly. What the hell.

I didn’t have time to question it, I tossed the books through and flung myself after them. It was a very tight fit. If my shoulders had been even a centimeter wider, I would have been stuck. As it was, I had to shimmy through awkwardly, glass dust grinding into my elbows and the palms of my hands.

I crawled to my feet, grabbed my bag and took one wild look around. The street was dark and deserted, lined with buildings identical to the one I’d emerged from. From where I’d come from, I heard a crack even louder than the last, followed by shocking silence, the buzzing that had been audible above everything else stopping abruptly, leaving my ears ringing.

I picked a direction at random and started running.

After about seven blocks I had to stop, gasping for breath. It felt like I still had smoke trapped in my lungs, tar coating every inch of them. I leant against a wall, wheezing. I had no idea where I was, having just taken whatever corners I come to in at random. I wasn’t sure where I should go. How was I going to find Ross again?

I had to keep moving regardless, it wasn’t like I’d gotten too far from the so called safe house.  I staggered forward, bag bouncing painfully off my leg, the handles digging into the tender skin around my wrist.

That gave me an idea.

What if I went back to my place? I still needed to get those books, after all.

It was probably a pretty stupid idea. But really, who would think me dumb enough to go back to where I knew people knew I’d been? Everyone thought I was some powerful magic outlaw. Home was the last place anyone would look. Then, I could just lurk a few blocks away from the safe house and pray Ross found me, somehow.

This was a really, really stupid plan.

I didn’t have any better ideas.

So that’s what I decided to do. I was pretty spectacularly lost given Ross’s roundabout route to the safe house and my aimless flight from it, but I managed to eventually stumble across what looked like a main road to somewhere. The streets were weirdly empty, but I found an intersection with a street name I could punch into my phone to figure out where the hell I’d ended up. Shockingly, I wasn’t all that far from home. It felt like I’d gone miles away, but I guessed most of it had been in circles.

A man walked down the opposite sidewalk, head bent down, hands shoved into his pockets. Instinctively, I shrank back into the shadows of the closest building until he was out of sight. Taking a bus would get me there faster, but somehow walking sounded safer. It seemed counter-productive, but my instincts hadn’t lead me wrong yet that day.

It was a kind of damp and drizzly evening, so I pulled my hat out of my coat pocket and piled my hair into it and wrapped my scarf around the bottom half of my face for good measure. It wasn’t much of a disguise, especially given where I was going, but it was better than nothing.

I clung to the shadows as I headed towards home, and avoided the few people I saw. Only blocks away from my destination, I froze.

There was a man standing at the corner. He was wearing boots identical to the ones the Durand Family goon had been wearing in the alley. His face was turned away from me, so I slowly inched backwards, heart pounding.

He shifted his weight, like he was about to turn towards me. I froze on the spot, heart hammering in my chest.

Then I abruptly realized how suspicious that would look to any sane person. I was too far away for him to get a good look at me. I would look like any other random person going about their business to him. The man turned to face my direction, but didn’t move from where he was standing.

It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but I pretended to look at my phone, then turned on my heel and casually walked away. I felt like my knees were about to give out by the time I turned the corner, out of sight.

Okay. I was safe. That guy probably hadn’t even seen me, or if he had he would only have seen the back of my coat, maybe the tip of my hat. No reason to suspect anything. That didn’t mean I didn’t try to be a bit more cautious.

I took an exceptionally long, convoluted route around the probable thug waiting for me and approached each corner with caution. It took me an extra twenty minutes to get there, palms sweaty and heart still beating out an uneven tattoo. Comparatively, getting inside was easy.

There was no one around, which was a blessing given how jumpy I felt, exposed in the empty hallway. Inside, I didn’t feel any safer. All I had to do was grab the books and leave. It would take about thirty seconds and then I could get the hell out of there.

The books hadn’t been moved in the hours since I’d been there, which was comforting. I scooped them up and hugged them to my chest awkwardly. I was going to have to find a bag or something to carry all these books in at some point, this was pretty inconvenient. That was something I could deal with later, leaving was more important.

Just as I was about to push the front door back open, I heard footsteps.

It was probably just another tenant from the building, it was a pretty big place. There was plenty of people who could be innocently walking down the hallway who had nothing to do with me. I stayed where I was. It didn’t hurt to be cautious, I’d wait for them to leave.

The footsteps stopped. Right outside my door.

I clung to the books harder and held my breath. Whoever it was probably was just checking their phone or something. I was fine.

This was such a stupid idea.

After an eternity, I heard the footsteps start again, followed by the sound of a door closing. Exhaling in relief, I waited a few seconds and pushed the door open and stepped into the empty hallway.

Or not so empty.

There was a man waiting in the hallway just to the left of the door, casually leaning against the opposite wall.

He was wearing the heavy boots Ross had recognized. A tattoo peeked out of the sleeve of his t-shirt. He was smiling widely at me, his eyes dark and cruel in comparison.

“Hello, darling,” he said.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mild violence warning for this chapter, guys

Shit.

Shitshitshitshit.

“I bet Alvarez 50$ you wouldn’t be stupid enough to come back here,” The guy said conversationally, his expression casual, but his eyes hard and cruel. In one hand he held something that glowed dull red, like a dying ember.

“Like, I told her, no way is the guy that’s evaded us for four years stupid enough to come back to the one place he knows we’re looking for him,” the thug continued, taking one lazy step forward, like a predator playing with its food. He was a big guy, nearly filling the doorway with his bulk. He would have even dwarfed Nikolaidis. He probably could have _bench pressed_ Nikolaidis. Another stupid thought I shouldn’t have been paying attention to in that moment.

“And yet, here you are!” he continued flinging his hands up with a great big laugh, a wide grin stretched across his face. Above all else, it was that smile that made me want to run.

I only had one advantage here, the man didn’t know that I knew nothing. It was more of a handicap than a benefit, but at least he wouldn’t be able to make me betray anyone since I didn’t have anything to give up.

“Here I am,” I agreed shakily. My fingers clenched white-knuckled against the handles of the bag of books.

The thug tipped his head back, laughing uproariously, shoulders heaving. To be honest, I didn’t think it was that funny.

Ross wasn’t here to bail me out this time; it was up to me.

He’d said to run first, hide if I couldn’t and attack last. Hiding hadn’t gone so well. Essentially, I had two choices: fight or flight.

I chose flight.

In one quick motion I leapt forward and swung the bag of books squarely into his face as hard as I could. They connected with a painful, fleshy crack. The thug stumbled back a step, cursing and clutching at his bloody nose. I tripped forward and nearly fell, catching myself just in time and I took off towards the exit. The thug reacted faster than I’d hoped, and I only got a half dozen steps down the hall before he grabbed me.

“You little-” he hissed, blood trickling down his cheek from a cut on his eyebrow. His nose was steadily dripping blood, staining his lips and teeth gory red.

Instinctively, I jerked forward in his grip and smashed my forehead into his nose and then threw my body weight back away from him, trying to break his grip. It worked, a little too well. I crashed to the floor in a heap and he stumbled backwards into the wall with a dull thud, the wall shuddering with his weight. That gave me an idea.

I scrambled to get my feet under me and screamed at the top of my lungs: “HELP!”

Even if I didn’t escape, someone would have to call the cops. Ross said I couldn’t trust them but it was all could think to do.

One step, then another. All I had to do was get to the stairs, I could lose him there.

From behind me, there was an almost animalistic snarl, followed by a small explosion to my right. I fell to the floor again, my shoulder incandescent with pain. That explosion hadn’t been to my right. It had been on me.

The pain was nearly all-consuming. I saw stars, and I couldn’t think for the pain. I could smell burning flesh; it made me gag and want to throw up. That smell was _me_.

I tried to roll onto my stomach to get my knees under me and _crawl_ away if I had to, but the second my shoulder grazed the carpet floor my mind went white with pain. I sobbed with my face pressed into the floor, involuntary tears welling up in my eyes.

“Help,” I croaked out again, voice ruined. Someone had to have heard the fight, they had to be calling the cops.

“Now don’t go doing that,” the thug said chastisingly. In his hand the object he was holding was glowing brighter, and I could feel the heat rolling off of it like he had a bonfire in his palm. His boot connected with my ribs, hard enough to make me skid backwards into the opposite wall of the hallway.

I wheezed for breath, not able to get enough in to call out for help again.

I couldn’t even do more than an aborted attempt to roll back onto my stomach when the thug stomped down on my injury. His heavy boot pinned me to the floor and he ruthlessly ground the heavy sole of his boot down.

I sobbed for breath and tried to squirm away, but it only made the pain worse and I fell limp.

“Now that’s better,” the thug said, falsely pleasant. I could barely see his face through the tears and with his body blocking the light, but I knew he was still smiling.

“I’m going to pay you back for every injury you gave me tenfold,” he continued. “And I’m going to enjoy it.” He punctuated this by leaning all his weight onto my shoulder, drawing a scream out of me and making something in the joint pop painfully. Then his foot was suddenly gone, the sudden absence almost equally painful. He sat down on my torso carelessly, brandishing the glowing object in my face.

“But first, I’m going to make good on my promise from the last time we me,” he said.

He brought the weapon down on my skin and it was like being touched with a burning iron. I tried to arch away, but he was too heavy and there was nowhere to go.

“Every scar you’ve left me, I’m going to pay you back, mark for mark,” he continued, his voice deceptively calm as he moved his hand across my sternum in an agonizingly slow arc. “I mean,” he continued, snorting bitterly. “This is hardly an even payback. But there’s no way for me to give you the full experience of how the Family has treated me after what you did to me. The shame, the distrust. Forcing me to chase after you like a dog. But I guess I’ll just have to make do,” he added and punctuated this by lifting his hand up and driving it back down into my arm, making me scream hoarsely. “And when I bring you back to the boss, I’ll get my old rank back. Boss might even let me have the first go at getting in your head. Won’t that be fun?”

At the end of the hall, only five steps away, the door flew open, slamming loudly into the wall beside it.

“We have to get out of here,” a woman’s voice said. It was the same one from the apartment. Apparently my daring escape plan had been less successful than I’d hoped.

“J’s lot will be here soon,” she added. At this angle all I could see of her was from her knees down. She was wearing the same kind of boots, though more worn looking.

“Kinda figured that, what with all the mayhem and the fact that our boy here has very rudely caused such a racket,” the man said irritably and crouched down next to my face. All I could see were his heavy, black boots and one of his thick knuckled hands. He had complex tattoos all over his wrist and fingers, but my eyes wouldn’t focus enough to get a good look at them.

“Hey, you,” the thug said, snapping his fingers in front of my face.

I grunted in return. If he wanted actual words, the jackass shouldn’t have kicked me in the diaphragm.

“Stay awake, we’re not done with you,” he said, like that was my fucking problem, “You’re going to answer some questions for us.”

“Ffffuck you,” I managed to hiss out, bloody spittle dripping from my mouth. Gross. I must have bitten my lip. Nothing really hurt, since the pain from my shoulder was burning so hot I could barely feel my limbs much less any other injuries. Somehow I got the feeling that wasn’t a good sign.

“You’re gonna want to sing a different tune, songbird,” the thug said and very casually dug his thumb into the center of my injured shoulder.

My vision whited out again. Distantly, I think I was screaming.

“-cks sake, calm your tits, we need to get him out of here asap,” the woman was saying.

My ragged breathing was almost loud enough to my ears to drown out her hurried whisper.

“Fine, fine,” the thug said and in a single motion, slung me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

To say it was excruciating would be an understatement. Getting outside was even worse. The thug jogged the remaining steps down the hall and down the flights of stairs leading outside. The woman followed behind us, but I didn’t get a good look at her as my eyes were streaming with tears from the pain. By the time we emerged out in the alley behind the apartment building, I wished I’d just passed out. I was dropped to the ground without much fanfare or concern about me attempting to escape. For good reason; my legs didn’t even pretend to try and hold my weight and I immediately fell on my ass, trying to stop sobbing. If I’d had the breath for it, I would have thrown up.

“Christ, Nguyen, did you have to hurt him this bad? He’s practically no use like this,” The woman grumbled to her partner. She had her arms crossed across her chest and was frowning at me like a particularly tricky Sudoku puzzle.

“He was getting away,” the thug protested, “We need to get a tracker spell on Ross within the next hour or we’ll lose him again.”

“ _I’m_ the one who told you that,” the woman replied pointedly. She then proceeded to nudge my thigh with her foot. “Hey, hey. Wake up asshole, pay attention. Where’s Ross? We know you two met up today, so don’t bother lying.”

“Fuck you,” I replied. I would have said something a bit more elaborate or cutting, but frankly that was the extent of which I was capable at that point.

“Hey now, that’s uncalled for,” Nguyen said, mock-affronted. “We’re being polite here.”

I squinted up at Nguyen, really seeing his face for the first time. He had tan skin and dark hair and looked like the definition of a thug with his heavy boots and beat-up leather coat. He looked completely ordinary for someone who had tortured me minutes before. Somehow, that struck me as monumentally unfair. Someone so ugly on the inside to have the capacity to dole out that much pain had no right to look ordinary.

“You don’t want to piss me off,” Alvarez said coldly. Her dark hair was a cloud of tumbling curls in front of her face. It probably should have made her look a bit ridiculous, but just made her look more menacing. This woman could kill in cold blood and feel no remorse. Where her partner was wild and full of anger and unpredictable, she was calculated and cold. That might have been related to the fact that I was lying in a dirty alley, bleeding, while she towered over my crumpled form, but I was dead certain that between the two of them, Alvarez was the one to be frightened of.

Nguyen interrupted my wandering thoughts but muttering something in a language I didn’t know to Alvarez, which prompted her to say something back, sharp and irritated.

Tan, dark hair and a leather coat... was Nguyen an Indonesian name? I couldn’t remember. I didn’t think it was but it was so hard to think... I was starting to feel pretty woozy and it was so hard trying to concentrate.

“Hey do I know you?” I asked him, interrupting Alvarez mid-threat.

Nguyen and Alvarez exchanged a baffled look like they weren’t sure what to make of me. That was probably a stupid question to ask. Stupid me.

I didn’t have to decide if revealing to these thugs I was missing two decades of memories was a bad idea or not, because our little party was interrupted by what sounded like a firecracker going off and a near-blinding light.

Alvarez fell backwards with a curse that could strip paint. Nguyen wheeled around to face the direction the sound came from but he was struck down before he could do anything more than react. The first firecracker shot was to his thigh, but that only brought him to his knees.  A second came a beat later and caught him straight to the center of his chest. Nguyen collapsed sideways with a gurgle, his head landing on his partner’s outstretched arm.

I knew a chance when I saw it. I needed to get the hell out of there. Preferably before the source of the firecrackers got to me. My legs, on the other hand, weren’t on the same page and refused to stay under me. It was like trying to stand on melting jello. I ended up on my ass, eyes whiting out with pain when I hit the wall on my way down.

That didn’t matter; Nguyen and Alvarez weren’t stirring. I’d crawl out of there it I had to. Just as soon as I could see again. I rolled onto my knees and elbows, biting my lip against the pain.

A body dropped down next to me.

“Dassa’s tits, how are you this stupid?” Ross’s voice demanded as he hauled me into a sitting position, none too gently.

I tried to explain that I’d been trying to help, but the words got all tangled up in my mouth and came out in a jumbled, incoherent mess like the remains of a ball of yarn after a cat had gotten to it.

My vision was still all funny, but I could still clearly see the face Ross was making at me. It wasn’t an impressed one. Next to us, Alvarez groaned quietly.

“Shit. We have to get out of here, that trick only works so many times,” Ross muttered, mostly to himself. He hauled me to my feet before he discovered the whole Jello legs problem and let me sink back down to the ground.

“You are such a pain in the ass, when you get your memories back you owe me so many charms,” he grumbled and hefted me over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.

I whined high in the back of my throat, it felt like my whole body was an open wound throbbing in time with my heart. My vision was blurry and my hearing was taken over by an incessant buzzing that crowded out all sound and didn’t leave room for a single thought.

I stayed like that for a good long while. I wasn’t quite unconscious, but I was only a step away from it. I could feel things and see a little less, but it all felt inconsequential and without meaning.

When I resurfaced, it wasn’t quite like waking up and more like I realized my eyes were open and that I was seeing things and understanding that that was supposed to mean something.

I was nearly laying fully horizontal in the passenger seat of a car. Late evening sun was streaming through the windshield, directly into my eyes, blinding me. I turned my face away with a pained sound. Light hurt. So did moving my head.

“Oh you’re awake then. You bastard,” Ross said from the driver’s seat, voice deceptively calm.

“Possibly,” I croaked, squinting at him. It felt like my eyesight had been cranked up to eleven, making everything too bright and too sharp to my eyes. A migraine pounded at my temples, but that was only second to my shoulder. That, I couldn’t bring myself to look at, not only because moving my head that much sounded like a bad idea, but also because it felt like ground beef and I didn’t want to confirm that as true or not. Ground beef shoulder didn’t sound good even if it wasn’t actually ground beef-y. Wow I was _seriously_ concussed.

“No less than you deserve,” Ross said, eyes still on the road but his voice hard.

“’m sorry,” I mumbled contritely. “I thought it was the last place they’d look for me.”

“You thought the last place they’d look for you was your own apartment? Where they know you live? Obviously. Of course that would be the last place they’d look. Why didn’t I think of that? Why in Dassa’s name did I waste all this time and money on safe houses when we could just hide exactly where they know you live?” Ross’s voice rose with each word he said before he broke off with aggravated huff of breath and went silent.

After a long moment, I mumbled, “Well, it sounds stupid when you say it like that.”

“How in god’s name are you even the same person?” Ross grumbled under his breath. It sounded like a rhetorical question, so I didn’t bother trying to answer.

“Where are we?” I asked an indeterminate amount of time later. For all that I was properly conscious now, time felt like a slippery inconsequential thing and it was hard to tell how fast it was passing.

“Outside of the city,” Ross replied, voice curt.

I nodded, a very small motion. Talking was still hard, and really what did it matter?

“How are you feeling?” Ross asked after a moment. He sounded kind of apologetic. When I cracked my eyes back open, his face was turned towards me slightly, and he was looking a bit shamefaced. Or maybe worried. There was so much light in the car, it was hard to make things out properly. Everything was overexposed and washed out looking. Somehow, that struck me as being weird.

“Ow,” I said, which I thought summed things up pretty nicely.

“You were out of it for nearly an hour,” Ross said, eyes flicking back to the road quickly and then back to my face. “Alvarez and Nguyen weren’t going to stay down for long, so I didn’t have much time to patch you up, since we needed to get the hell out of there first. We’re heading to meet someone who can do a better job than I can at healing you up.”

“Cool,” I replied, most of the words making sense to me but I was pretty sure there was at least a few I missed. It was hard to focus with so much light and noise from the car and from outside on the highway.  “Why’s everything so bright?” I asked, whining when light reflected off a passing car and felt like it was burning my eyes out and stabbing me directly in the brain at the same time.

“It’s a reusable spell you leant me a few months back,” Ross explained, “It’s preventing your body from getting hurt worse from the spells Nguyen shot at you. Not really meant for this use, it’s meant for warriors in battle, it amps up your senses and reflexes mostly in addition to shielding spells.”

“Okay,” I said and closed my eyes. Frankly it seemed like a huge handicap, what with the whole not being able to open your eyes fully for the sun burning them to ashes, but that might have been the ground beef shoulder injury talking.

“We’ll get where we’re going in another hour or so,” Ross added, starting to sound a little alarmed, “Just hang tight.”

“Will do,” I replied, the words sounding a little slurred even to my ears.

I lost a bit more time there, but a few moments were clear in the fog of pain and blinding light; Ross’s hand on my chin as he forced cool water down my throat, the sound of his voice as he told me something- I couldn’t parse the words, but his voice was a comforting rhythm in contrast to the grinding ear-stabbing noise of the car’s engine and the eye-stabbing light reflected from passing vehicles.

Eventually, the car stopped. I realized this long after it had stopped, mostly I realized we were no longer in motion when the passenger door of the car opened and someone undid my seatbelt.

“Jesus Christ, Ross, what did you do to him?” A woman’s voice asked in a hissed whisper.

“None of that was _my_ fault,” Ross replied back indignantly.

“You couldn’t have put a bandage on that shoulder, look how much blood he’s lost,” the woman said. A hand pressed to my forehead. It felt a lot colder than I thought it should have.

“There wasn’t any time,” Ross said, but he sounded anxious.

The woman sighed and the hand disappeared. I whined quietly. The cold had felt nice; I was feeling pretty overheated. Ross should have turned the heat off, the car was positively roasting.

“Get him inside before that fever of his gets any worse,” The woman said. There was a sound of rustling cloth and retreating footsteps and a door opening.

Hands pushed their way under my knees and between my back and the seat I was laying on. I whined at this; the last two times I’d been carried anywhere, it had hurt a lot.

The hands froze under me.

“You’re awake?” Ross asked, sounding dumbfounded.

“Nnn,” I replied, because I wasn’t sure this counted as being awake. It didn’t seem like it should.

“Okay. You’re going to be okay. We’re somewhere safe, there’s a person here to help heal you. I just have to carry you inside,” Ross said, continuing to gently get his arms under me.

“Nnnn,” I protested. Both times I’d been carried had seriously sucked, I’d rather stay in the over hot car than do that again, really.

“It’s only a few feet, you’ll feel better in there, I promise. It’ll be quick, it won’t hurt like in the alley did, we’ll take our time,” Ross promised and, before I could protest, picked me up out of the car.

Ross was right; it didn’t hurt as much as the alley. Didn’t mean it didn’t suck a hell of a lot. I squirmed weakly, trying to make the pain stop, which only made things hurt more but I couldn’t help it, but Ross’s grip was unyielding and didn’t let up. After another second of struggle, I gave up, muscles going lax. I had no more fight left in me.

It was over in a matter of minutes and Ross set me down on something soft, probably a bed, and I let out a sigh of relief. Ross was right; this was much better than being in the car. The bed was a lot cooler than the car, almost alarmingly- it was like being taken out of the oven and promptly shoved in the freezer; my body broke out in goosebumps and I shivered violently. I still felt like I was roasting, but the cool air and sheets against my skin was an agony of contrasts. A whine of discomfort rose from my parched throat.

“He’s awake?” The woman’s voice asked incredulously.

“You know how he’s always been a stubborn jackass,” Ross replied from nearby.

“It’s okay, you can sleep now,” the woman said to me gently, “You’ll feel better when you wake up.”

Her cool hands pressed to my cheeks and the uncomfortable hot, burning feeling that had plagued me since I woke up in the car the first time seemed to sink out of my bones at last. The light burning through my eyelids dimmed slowly.

I sighed deeply and let go.


	7. Chapter 7

Things came back to me in bits and pieces. The soft feeling of sheets under me. The weight of something thrown over my feet. A radio slightly out of the right frequency playing pop music, scratchy and faded in the next room. The smell of dust and laundry detergent and something green. Sunlight on my face.

The last thing made me cautious, remembering how much light had hurt the last time I’d opened my eyes in the car.

But I really, really needed to piss, and I didn’t think I’d get very far if I kept my eyes shut.

Carefully, I slowly cracked one eye open.

The small room I was laying in was bright with morning sunlight, but not painfully so.

Emboldened, I opened both eyes all the way and looked around the room.

It was pretty small, just big enough for the twin bed I was laying in, a set of drawers and a chair squeezed in between them. A huge bay window was at the opposite end of the room, with a window seat that looked enticingly cozy, covered in a pile of colourful cushions.  A door was cracked open, just visible beyond the set of drawers.

Moving sounded pretty hard, but it was that or wet myself, so I cautiously sat up, using my arms to push myself up. Instantly I knew it was a mistake, my injured shoulder throbbed and there was a line of fire across my collarbone. My arms gave out and I collapsed back against the bed. A nearly animal noise of pain ripped itself out of me without permission.

There was a shout and a clatter of dishes and Ross and an unfamiliar woman all but fell into the room all at once.

“You’re awake!” The woman exclaimed a bit redundantly and hurried over to the bed.

“What in Dassa’s name are you doing?” Ross demanded at the same time, scowling furiously.

“You really shouldn’t be moving yet,” the woman said chidingly and pressed a hand to my forehead. Her hand felt refreshingly cool to the touch; I must have still had a fever. She frowned at what she felt and pulled her hand back.

“I just need to use the bathroom,” I said, aggrieved.

“At least your fever’s broken,” the woman said and sat back on her heels and let Ross step around her. “Though not gone completely, like it should have with what I gave you. Your immune system is just as stubborn as you are, as usual.”

Ross moved like he was making to carry me to the bathroom and I glared at him, holding up a hand to stop him.

“No, I refuse, no more carrying,” I said firmly. I was _exceptionally_ done with being carried anywhere, three times in one day had filled that quota forever for me.

Ross rolled his eyes. “Yeah, you’re feeling better, you pain in the ass,” he said and helped me sit up again, careful to only pull me up by with hands steadying on my back rather than put pressure on my injured shoulders.

We made a slow and lumbering trip across the room and down a short hall that took a frankly embarrassing amount of time because of how shaky my legs were. Really, it would have been a lot faster to let Ross carry me but, as he’d said, I was a stubborn jackass.

He made to stay in the bathroom but I shooed him out to deal with things on my own. He rolled his eyes at me but stood just outside the door, just in case I fainted or something.

That was probably a real danger I realized after I’d done my business and had to wash my hands one at a time, since letting go of the counter entirely was a bad idea and I wobbled dangerously when I attempted it anyways.

I sank down on my knees and ate my pride and called to Ross through the door to help me.

“Honestly,” he said when he opened the door to the sight of me on my knees with my eyes shut and my forehead pressed to the bathroom cabinets, trying to make the room stop spinning. “Even without your memories, you’re just as stupidly proud.”

“Not helping,” I grumbled back, but let him gently haul me to my feet and throw my less injured arm over his shoulder.

Ross was seriously a deceptively strong guy; even in such an awkward position, with my legs not even holding my own weight, and me being quite a bit taller than him, he still managed to easily carry me back to my sickbed and then proceeded to tuck me in and anything despite my incoherent protests.

Once I was all settled in, I was out like a light.

It must have been a few hours later- there was a lot less light in the room- but it felt like minutes when I woke up a second time.

“Good evening,” the woman from before said. She was sitting on the chair next to the bed, a worn looking book lying open on her lap.

“Hi,” I said after an awkward beat. Was I supposed to know her? I hoped Ross had explained my situation, I wasn’t feeling up for a long session of story time.

“This is kind of weird,” the woman said with a soft laugh, “Ross explained, but, well, we were friends, you and I. I’m Amahle.”

“Nice to meet you,” I croaked, noticing how dry my mouth felt. “Do you have any water?”

“Of course, you must be pretty dehydrated,” she said and helped me sit up against the headboard and handed me a glass of water. It was tepid and had clearly been sitting out for quite a while, but I had to stop myself from chugging it because of how good it felt on my parched throat.

“Don’t make yourself sick,” Amahle chided, taking the empty glass from me, “I’ve put a lot of time and effort into trying to get you better.”

“How long was I asleep?” I asked, laying back down.

“Since you last woke up? Or since Ross got you out of the car?” She asked.

I shrugged, either really.

“You woke up about six hours ago, and you got here about a day and a half ago.”

I blinked open the eyes I hadn’t realized I’d closed.

“That long?” I asked. I knew I had to have been unconscious for a pretty long time, but nearly two days?

“You were in pretty rough shape, it was better for you to stay asleep through the worst of it,” Amahle explained.

“I’m better now?” I asked, because while I felt a lot better than before, I still felt like I’d been run over by a truck and then nuked in a microwave. And possibly put through a blender after that. Maybe then run over by a second truck. Repeatedly. I was feeling really shitty, was what I meant. Just less at death’s door.

“Hardly, but you aren’t as sick as you were before, and you shouldn’t be getting any worse. Ross and Nguyen did quite the number on you,” she said. “I’m lucky I had such a good teacher, or you would have been in a lot of trouble.”

“What happened?” I asked, “What was that thing that thug shot me with? It looked like fire, sort of.”

“I’m guessing it was a dragon eye,” Amahle said, “They’re popular with the Durand Family since nearly any idiot with an ounce knowledge of magic can use them. They normally don’t cause so much damage, but combined with everything else and what Ross did, well, you probably can feel what sort of effect it all had.”

“Dragon?” I said. I didn’t have any random encyclopedic knowledge on dragons, unlike previous similar topics. That was kind of a letdown, dragons sounded pretty badass.

“Not an actual dragon eye,” Amahle said, amusement creeping into her voice, “I doubt even the Durand Family could bring one of those suckers down, if they could even find one. It’s a stone under specific enhancements and other spells, the name is just because of how it looks when in use.

“Getting back to your health; you’ve made good progress, considering your state when Ross brought you here.” Here she frowned, fingers flexing like she wanted to wrap them around a certain redhead’s neck. “You’ll probably feel like shit for the next two days and then bounce back alarmingly fast, like usual.”

“Ross said he used a warrior charm on me?” I asked. My memories from the car were pretty fuzzy, but I thought I remembered that conversation. “It hurt me?”

Amahle nodded, “Yes. But it also probably saved your life. It’s too bad I had to destroy it to get it off of you and heal you, it was a very neat little charm and I have no clue how you made it. But it’s a bit like giving someone a shot of adrenaline; it can have some negative side effects if you’re already in bad shape. What worries me more is what Ross had to do to get you out of there safely.

“Nguyen must have modified the dragon eye, it left threads attached to you so to speak. Magical ones. Ross had to cut those off so they couldn’t use them to track you but he’s hardly a mage, so he made a hash of it, especially since he was in a rush.”

“I did the best I could,” Ross’s voice grumbled from the hallway, a split second before he appeared in the doorway. He was holding what appeared to be a bowl of soup. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it; food sounded good to my empty stomach, but eating sounded equally hard.

“I know,” Amahle said patiently, “But it also makes healing a lot more difficult, especially since it’s a bit beyond my abilities.”

“Why?” I asked as Ross made me sit back up again, propped up against a pile of pillows instead of all the way up against the headboard, which was easier. This eating business was becoming less of as appealing as it became more and more of a chore.

Amahle pursed her lips in concentration. “It’s a bit hard to explain- you were the one to teach me high magic,” she said with as sad smile.

“But imagine that the spell Nguyen hit you with had barbs attached to it. Ross- figuratively, mind you- cut the threads they were attached to but left the barbs still in you. I need to get those out before they damage you magically.”

“I have magic barbs stuck in me?” I asked, horrified, but also kind of morbidly intrigued. “Gross.”

“They shouldn’t be there anymore, my hard work was digging them out without causing any permanent damage to you. But yes, essentially,” Amahle agreed and took the soup from Ross and held up the spoon to my lips.

“I can feed myself,” I protested, mostly on principle since, really, lifting my arms to do that sounded like too much effort to be worth it.

“Oh don’t fuss,” she said, and shoved the spoon in my mouth before I could protest. The soup was surprisingly good, some sort of rich broth, that tasted like _warmth_ and _home_ somehow. It slid down my throat and pooled pleasantly in my stomach. Instantly, I felt a little less awful.

“Home recipe,” Amahle explained at my startled hum of approval. “This is more of my kind of magic.”

“You aren’t a mage?” I asked after swallowing the next spoonful.

“Nope, just your usual garden variety herb witch. My grandmother taught me all of that, when I was a kid. You taught me high magic when we met a few years ago,” she explained, a sad smile playing on her lips.

“I thought only mages could use high magic,” I said with a frown.

“That’s what we thought too,” Ross said from his perch at the foot of the bed. “You were insistent that with enough practice anyone could use it, turns out you were right. I was too impatient to learn even the basics, but I remembered enough to figure out a way to cut those threads.”

“And a fine job of it you did,” Amahle said dryly, feeding me the last spoonful of soup. I felt warm and cozy, like I hadn’t since I’d come home from the hospital. I was safe and drowsy, like nothing could hurt me here. I never wanted to leave this feeling. My eyes drifted closed for a few seconds before I pulled them back open with great effort. Amahle and Ross started to squabble like children pulling on each other’s pigtails.

“Oh I’m sorry,” Ross said sarcastically, “I assumed you didn’t want a bunch of Durand thugs storming into your home.”

Amahle threw a stray pillow at him with one hand and stood up, holding the empty soup bowl in the other. “Oh go make yourself useful and get me some clean sheets out of the linen closet,” she grumbled, “We need to change the sheets on this bed.”

“Nnn,” I protested, because I was seriously comfortable. At some point I’d lost the war with my eyelids, because they were shut again.

There was a soft sigh followed by a gentle thud.

“Fine, but I’m changing them when you wake up again. They’re utterly disgusting,” Amahle told me sternly.

I grunted in agreement and let myself go back to sleep.

When I woke up a third time, I got where she was coming from. I seriously smelled and the bed was almost worse off; sticky with sweat from my fever and blood, presumably from someone changing the bandages on my injured shoulders. I was nearly certain my own stench was what had woken me up, or at the very least the crawling feeling of uncleanliness on my skin had.

It was light in the room again; I must have slept through the night since it appeared to be morning again. I was looking forward to the time when I could stay awake for more than ten minutes at a time and didn’t crash for half a day afterwards.

I had just started contemplating getting out of bed on my own power when Amahle stuck her head in through the bedroom door.

“I thought you might be awake,” she said with a smile. She entered the room proper, followed by Ross.

Ross half carried me to the bathroom just as he had the day before, this time staying in the bathroom with his back to me, but when I was done this time instead of carrying me back to my bed, he pointedly sniffed in my direction and said, “Shower?”

I considered this. If I couldn’t walk five feet from the bedroom to the bathroom, could I stay upright in a slippery ceramic death trap on my own? Probably not. On the other hand, I was seriously rank.

“Bath?” I asked, wrinkling my nose. It wouldn’t be as nice as a hot shower, but at least I’d smell less afterwards.

“Good choice,” Ross said and made me sit on the toilet lid while he got the water going. He courteously turned his face away while I struggled out of my dirty clothing and carefully crawled into the filling tub. He took my spot on the toilet, but pushed the shower curtain part way shut so I had a semblance of privacy. I was glad he hadn’t suggested he wait outside; even getting myself into the tub had been a struggle, and the chances of me accidentally drowning myself was embarrassingly possible with how weak I was feeling.

As I sat in the warm, clean, water, I examined my injuries, which I had yet to look at. I was covered in bruises and scrapes from my encounter with Alvarez and Nguyen. The worst was on my ribs from when Nguyen had kicked me into the wall. If you looked close enough I thought you probably could see the outline of Nguyen’s boot. I didn’t look that closely: it was purple and black and puffy and _gross_. My shoulders were still covered in bulky bandages, which I left alone and tried to keep dry, though I was only partially successful. There was also a lighter bandage across my clavicle that went from one shoulder to the other, from where Nguyen had dragged the Dragon’s eye across my skin. It was probably the least painful of my injuries, but just thinking of it made me remember his weight across my chest and his frighteningly friendly works as he hurt me, so I tried to pretend the injury wasn’t even there. The stitches I still had from the night I lost my memories was covered in a smaller bandage, and was painful to the touch, so I assumed I’d probably torn a few when I’d been getting my ass kicked by Nguyen.

“How did you meet Amahle?” I asked after a long moment. It probably was weird for me to try and have a conversation with Ross while I took a bath, but it felt weirder to try and ignore the fact that he was sitting in the bathroom with me to make sure I didn’t accidentally drown myself.

“You introduced us,” Ross replied after a startled pause, “I’m not sure how you met her, she’s never told me, but she’s patched both of us up a number of times. She’s a very talented herb witch, the best I’ve ever encountered.”

“Is that why I was teaching her high magic?” I asked curiously. My memories were slippery, incomplete things when it came to magic, like I had a bunch of out of order pages ripped from several books, rather than a library. I knew that high magic was generally a closely guarded secret and thought to be special to hereditary mage families, while low magic was based in tradition and ceremonies anyone could practice, but not terribly powerful. By that thinking it should have been impossible for me to teach Amahle anything even if she was a strong low magic practitioner.

“Her being associated with us has gotten her into trouble a few times,” Ross replied, voice soft and regretful, “After one too many close calls you insisted both of us learn since high magic can be used on the fly more easily. I’m complete shit at it, so you let me give up after a few weeks, but Amahle was better, so you kept on teaching her whenever you could.”

I considered this, rinsing shampoo out of my hair (a painfully long process). The thought of meeting Alvarez and Nguyen again scared me deeply in a way I almost couldn’t describe. I’d felt so weak, like an ant facing the boot of a god. And they were only general thugs; I had two armies of people like them and stronger hunting me down. It was only a matter of time before something happened, and it would probably make my encounter with those two look like a bit of roughhousing. The bigger monsters were still only waiting in the wings.

“I need Amahle to teach me what I taught her,” I said quietly.

“You might not need to, if you get your memories back,” Ross replied, sounding a bit startled. And panicked.

I picked at a scab on my elbow and said in a small voice, “I don’t think I will. I don’t know what caused my amnesia- but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t natural.” My hands were shaking under the water, so I knitted my fingers together to steady them. “The doctors at the hospital said amnesia is usually complete or only of a specific stretch of time- I lost my entire life, but I remember little useless bits and pieces; my bank PIN, what high and low magic are. I didn’t have any sort head injury or anything to explain _why_ I lost my memories; the doctors were baffled. So I think... I think it was deliberate, by me or someone else.”

“Why would anyone choose to do that?” Ross asked, “We don’t know a lot from that night; but you were being chased, why would you or someone else take the time to take your memories away if your first priority was to get to safety?”

“Ross... You said I told you that night that I was going to teleport away but...” I trailed off, the words just above a whisper, “Is that even possible?”

“What?” Ross asked.

“Teleportation. Is that even a spell you’ve ever heard of? Have I ever mentioned it, or anyone else?” I explained.

“No,” Ross said. He sounded shaken and I heard him stand up and start to pace in the tiny space between the tub and the counter and the door.

“If you haven’t... do you think it really exists? Why didn’t I ever use it before? I’m sure there were at least a few times when I could have used it to get out of a tight spot, a few narrow escapes when I should have died,” I said quietly. Ross didn’t reply just kept pacing the tiny room. “Think about it, what would you have done if I’d told you that night that I wasn’t going to make it, that I was going to get caught?”

“I would have come for you, of course,” Ross said instantly voice rough. “The only reason I didn’t was because you insisted you had things handled.”

“Exactly,” I said flatly. “And if I thought there was no way to win, that I was going to die or get caught I know I wouldn’t have wanted you to get hurt too. I would have lied to keep you away and... Prepared for the worst.”

“No,” Ross said, voice hollow. He stopped on the spot, right next to the end of the tub, just behind the curtain.

“I think I removed my own memories to prevent the Durand Family or Mria Yansi from getting them from me,” I finished softly.

The curtain was ripped back violently. Ross stared down at me, expression broken.

“No,” he repeated, “You didn’t. You couldn’t. You promised no more of that goddamn, Dassa cursed self-sacrificing bullshit, you absolute jackass!”

“I... I’m still right here,” I said awkwardly. “Nothing’s changed.”

Ross stared down at me, looking so utterly lost it broke my heart, breathing hard like he’d run a mile.

He didn’t say it, but I still heard the words _no you’re not_ and _yes it has._

“You better not be undoing all my hard work in there!” Amahle shouted through the door. “And don’t spend too long in that water, you’ll get sick again!”

The moment was broken and Ross looked away roughly.

“It’s nothing, he’s just being an idiot,” he called back to Amahle, “Do you have any clean clothing for him?”

Amahle did, and she passed a stack of clothing through the door which Ross set on the floor next to the tub, along with a stack of towels.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Ross’s tense shoulders.

He shrugged. “It’s not your fault,” he replied without looking back, “You didn’t do this. You barely know me.”

“I mean, I’m still the same person,” I replied, “I might not remember you from before, but I know you now. And I’d still make the same choice.” There was no other option. I’d choose Ross being free over both of us being dead or captured any day. It was an easy decision.

Ross hissed a curse under his breath and wheeled around, glaring fiercely and snarled, “Don’t you dare say that.”

I didn’t reply and after a long moment he sighed, rubbing a hand over his face, shoulders slumping.

“Do you need help getting out?” He asked.

I considered my current situation. The bathtub was a slippery death trap and my legs and arms felt shivery and weak just from sitting on my ass and washing myself.

“Yes,” I sighed in defeat.

Ross hauled me out of the tub and helped me wring the worst of the water out of my hair while I dried the rest of me off as quickly as possible before pulling on the clothing Amahle had supplied me. The sweatpants and t-shirt were well worn and smelled like some sort of herb, fresh and green, and most shockingly, actually fit me. I wriggled my toes and stared in amazement at the hems of the pants that reached past my ankle bones.

“You leave a few sets of clothing here at Amahle’s place, for times like these,” Ross explained, sounding faintly amused, but mostly just worn out and sad.

It probably should have concerned me that I got injured often enough that I kept clothing at a healer’s home, despite apparently being proficient in high magic.

By the time I got back into bed, I was relieved to be off my feet, but still not feeling the overwhelming exhaustion I’d felt the last time I’d woken up.

“You feeling up for some solid food?” Amahle asked me as she bundled up the gross sheets she’d taken off the bed while Ross and I had been in the bathroom.

My stomach gurgled loudly, startling everyone, including me.

“Yeah, that sounds great,” I said.

Amahle left the room with the dirty sheets and Ross sat down on the room’s only chair, still frowning, but his eyes were downcast.

“From what I know about high magic, there aren’t many spells related to memory,” he said, voice carefully controlled.

“Why not?” I asked. It seemed like something Mria Yansi would have researched the hell out of, being such a militant group. To me, it sounded like it could easily be used as a weapon, in a really awful way.

“From what I gather, memories are kind of sacred, it has to do with how high magic is performed, the rituals and traditions and all that stuff. Mria Yansi and all those sorts of places are notoriously tight lipped, so all I know comes second hand”

“ _Summas memorium_ ,” I said, not knowing where the words came from. That was seriously starting to get irritating. Maybe I’d have to find a dictionary and just flip through it until I started knowing random shit like this. It would be only slightly less irritating.

Ross blinked at me curiously and said, “That sounds familiar, what the hell does it mean?”

“I’m not really sure,” I said and closed my eyes to concentrate. It reminded me of Amahle’s soup: warm, safe, family. It was the memories shared by all, the dead and the gone, but never truly gone.

“It was magic... everyone was part of it, since infancy. You learned through it. Or something, I think,” I said. After a moment, I opened my eyes: that was all I was going to get out of that.

“So nice and vague, like everything else,” I concluded with a smile I didn’t feel.

“Naturally,” Ross agreed grimly. “Maybe Amahle will know something about it. But either way, it will be hard to find any information about memory magic; low magic doesn’t deal with that sort of thing and hardly any information on high magic exists outside the clans’ city states.”

“There’s more than one?” I asked, surprised. I’d gotten the impression that the Mria Yansi had the corner market on high magic, so to speak.

“Yeah, there’s as many ways to practice magic as there are cultures in the world. Mria Yansi is the largest in this part of the world, and the closest to us. Low magic varies a lot in each part of the world, but information was shared a lot more, even in the old days, so lots of things are similar wherever you go,” he explained. “But that’s about all I really know, magic was always your and Amahle’s thing.”

“And the fae have their magic too,” I said, remembering. That was less a contextless memory trivia fact and more of a conclusion deduced from the fact that I knew a) the fae existed and b) they couldn’t use human magic like humans could.

Ross nodded. “Yeah I know even less about that, though. I doubt Amahle knows much about it either, it’s a closely guarded secret thing for those communities.”

“I don’t know much about what?” Amahle asked, entering the room. She was holding a tray bearing three bowls of familiar smelling soup, glasses of water and a few sandwiches.

“Fae magic,” Ross replied.

“Well, it certainly exists,” Amahle said as she doled out the food she’d brought us.

“Thank you for enlightening us,” Ross said as he accepted his food with a smile.

Amahle pretended to try and take his bowl back but immediately followed that with a laugh and handed me my own bowl.

“I know it can have some unexpected and unreplaceable effects with human magic, which is why anyone with any amount of fae blood don’t often practice low magic, and why mages tend to marry other mages since it can be... explosive,” She explained and settled at the food of my bed, leaning against the wall. “It has to do with none of them being from this dimension naturally. I think that’s about the sum total of my knowledge on fae magic. Why were you talking about it?”

Ross set his spoon down and explained my theory about my amnesia, face drawn.

Afterwards, her face equally sober, Amahle said, “Well it’s certainly _possible_ , just not terribly probable. You would probably have had to invent the spell yourself, maybe even spur of the moment if you realized you were on the verge of being captured.”

“It also raises the question of how you escaped if you were absolutely certain you couldn’t escape,” Ross added.

“Act of god?” I suggested, trying to lighten the mood. Amahle and Ross both looked so worried, like I was already dead and gone despite the fact that I was right there, safe and relatively sound.

“Rock falls, bad guys die,” Amahle said very seriously. The corner of her mouth twitched, betraying her

“Spontaneous combustion,” I replied with a growing grin.

“Lightning bolt,” Amahle countered quickly.

I snorted and pointed my spoon at her and said, “I already got that one, act of god- I win.”

Amahle laughed and held her hands up in defeat.

“You both are morons,” Ross said, a smile flitting across his face, lightning fast. “I have to go talk to some contacts tonight, now that you’re stable, okay?” he added to me.

Amahle frowned. “I have a shift tonight, I already called in sick yesterday,” she said.

“I’m feeling a lot better,” I said when Ross frowned at her, looking almost betrayed that she couldn’t put her whole life on hold for my sake. “Don’t worry about me.”

Amahle and Ross shot me identical looks of exasperation.

“Some things really don’t change,” Amahle said, looking sidelong at Ross, expression fond and exasperated.

“I’ll only be gone two hours, maybe two and a half,” Ross said.

They both regarded me like they were trying to decide if I would keel over or an asteroid would hit the house or something while they were gone.

“I’ll be fine,” I insisted, “I won’t even get out of bed or anything.”

They continued to look at me for another long moment before Amahle sighed and said “Alright, but swear you won’t move an inch unless the house is on fire or something.”

“Well now you’ve jinxed it,” I said with a smile, which I quickly smothered at the sharp look Amahle shot me. “I swear I won’t move,” I added dutifully.

She nodded in satisfaction and looked at Ross and asked, “You’ll only be two and a half hours?”

“At most,” he agreed.

It would have bugged me to be treated like a child who needed a babysitter, but frankly I kind of thought I did given how much of a hassle just taking a bath and changing my clothing had been. To be honest, it felt kind of nice to have two people care so much about me. It made me feel safe and protected in a way I hadn’t felt at the apartment by myself.

“Alright,” Amahle agreed eventually.

She and Ross both left the room to get organized and ready to leave, but both of them, much to my amusement, came back several times, as if to make sure I was keeping my promise. Which I was, mostly; I made Ross take me to the bathroom again before he left, his eyes darting suspiciously to my face like he thought I’d leap out of bed the second he looked away.

Amahle left after Ross did, but stopped in my room one last time before she did, bearing gifts.

“You aren’t tired you are you?” She asked, holding a bundle of... something to her chest.

“Not really,” I said. I was still feeling weak and kind of tired, but not like I wanted to sleep yet, just like I didn’t want to move unless absolutely necessary.

“Thought so,” She said, and dropped a bunch of paper on the bed. “I figured you’d probably get bored while we’re gone,” she explained.

I picked up the closest one and unfolded it.

At the top of the page it said:

_Dearest Aster,_

Before I read more, I looked up back at Amahle in shock.

“Ross said you went back for these. I’m sure you have questions about them, I can talk to you about them when I get back,” she said with a soft smile.

I only got out the word ‘but’ before she was out of the room.

I looked back down at the letter

_Dearest Aster…_


	8. Chapter 8

There was 23 letters in total. With the one missing, that made 24.

None of them had dates on them, so I couldn’t tell what order they’d been written in but I got a sense of which ones were older: more hopeful, and which ones were newer: longing and resigned, saying good bye.

I preferred the older ones, with their sappy but hopeful tone. But both of them left me longing for their context. It was like T knew I was reading them without knowing the meaning of what they referenced and was toying with me. It was almost enough to make me put the letters down in frustration, but instead made me devour them all the quicker, hoping for any hints I could find.

_My little imp, don’t think I forgot what you said to Ross about what happened at that river last summer. It was entirely your fault, not mine as you told him; how was I supposed to resist such an opportunity?_

Not all of the contents were oversweet and emotional. Near what I took to be the middle of the exchange, they grew downright pornographic at times.

_Next time I see you, I’m going to fuck you so hard the people tracking us will feel faint with envy and lust because of how loud you’ll be._

It made me a bit uncomfortable, and not just in the obvious way. It was too much of an invasion, to be reading these intimate words meant for someone else. It was all an invasion, but those parts were the only ones I skipped over.

 _Last night I dreamed we were together_ , one of the newer letters read, aching in its longing and resignation. _I could see your cheek resting on my pillow, your hair an awful mess. You were smiling in your sleep and held my hand. It was so real, I nearly cried when I reached for you in the morning and you weren’t there._

I fell asleep with the letters strewn across my lap, knowing less than I had before.

Oddly enough, I didn’t have any nightmares that night. I hadn’t the whole time I’d been at Amahle’s house, but I’d attributed that to the fact that it was less sleep and more a loss of consciousness.

I was woken roughly by Amahle’s hands on my shoulders shaking me.

“Have you seen Ross?” She demanded, braids spilling freely over her shoulders, expression frantic.

The room was bathed in weak gray light, signaling that it must have been very early morning. The whites of Amahle’s eyes stood out in sharp contrast to her dark skin made all the darker in the dim lighting.

“No?” I said, confused and still mostly asleep.

Amahle sighed and sat back on her heels, letting go of my shoulders as she did so. The fact that my answer comforted her said volumes about our lives before I’d lost my memories.

“I just got home from work, it doesn’t look like Ross came back at all,” She explained.

I sat up in alarm, not noticing how easy that was until I was fully upright. Amahle’s prediction about my healing was accurate: I felt a bit stiff and a little tired and shaky, but it was nothing compared to the crushing exhaustion and weakness of the past two days.

“Where did he even go? Can we track him down?” I asked, hands clutching at the blankets tangled around my legs. I could not handle losing Ross, I’d only just gotten my first links to my past. It was more than that, he had saved my life; he was my friend. My heart started to pound as that thought circled in my brain, over and over, faster and faster: I couldn’t lose him.

Amahle stood smoothly and shook her head, that small motion sending a wave of ice down my spine.

“No, I can’t do that sort of magic. And doing so would probably be dangerous for us and for Ross; we have no idea what sort of people he’s with or if it’s against his will or not,” she said, a sympathetic smile flickering across her face.

“What can we do?” I asked.

Amahle tilted her head and then said, “Well I was going to start with breakfast. Maybe pancakes.”

“What,” I said flatly. Our friend was missing, possibly being held against his will, by her own admission, and she wanted to make pancakes.

“I’m exhausted from work, but I won’t be able to sleep yet,” she said with a shrug, “And I doubt you can either, so let’s have something to eat and hope Ross comes back.”

I was categorically unimpressed with this plan of action, but sitting on my ass in my bed was hardly more useful and it wasn’t like I had any clue how to find Ross on my own, so I followed Amahle to the previously unexplored kitchen.

Her house was small, I knew that much already, and it was divided into almost perfect quarters of a square, with a short hallway leading to the front door separating the two halves of the square. On one side of the hallway was the room I’d been sleeping in, and Amahle’s room, which I hadn’t seen. On the other side of the hall was the bathroom and the kitchen that took up the larger portion of that half of the house.

The kitchen was a bit cramped, the table crammed in the corner not likely meant to fit in the space provided, but bright and painted a cheery, slightly chipped yellow.

“This is one of the extra buildings on the estate that used to belong to some fae lord,” Amahle explained as she took down a heavy cast iron pan from the wall behind the stove. “Which is why it’s so small, it wasn’t originally built to be lived in. But the rent is dirt cheap.”

Amahle kept up a steady stream of idle chatter about her home (too small but the perfect location), her family (parents, grandparents and three younger siblings), and her job (as a paramedic) while I sat at her table and tried to get my heart to slow down to a pace approaching normal.

Just as she was starting to flip slightly lumpy pancakes onto a plate, I interrupted her mid-sentence.

“I need you to teach me magic,” I told her abruptly.

She paused, spatula held aloft, frozen mid-motion. A pancake slipped from her spatula to the plate below with a quiet thwap.

“I need to be able to protect myself,” I said firmly. “I’m not letting what happened with Nguyen and Alvarez happen again. And, well you’re the only person I know who does magic stuff.”

Amahle set the pancakes on the table and sat down at the second chair at the table.

“I’m not sure how useful the magic I know would be for you,” she said. She dumped what looked like half the maple syrup in the containers on her plate and picked up her fork with a small smile.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Well, low magic is for more practical stuff, everyday things,” she explained, “Most of what I know is for healing, like that soup, or for encouraging plants to grow. What you’re looking for- defensive spells, attack spells, I’m guessing? That’s almost entirely high magic and you didn’t get that far in teaching me.”

“Almost entirely doesn't mean there isn’t anything,” I persisted, “Teach me whatever you can. Something has to be better than nothing.”

“Okay, okay,” she said agreeable, “I was just warning you. If you’re feeling up for it, we can start after we’re done breakfast.”

The sun was fully up by the time we were finished eating and the kitchen was relatively clean. Amahle took me outside and had me sit down on a cracked plastic chair in her overrun garden.

“Okay first thing, magic doesn’t come from you,” Amahle said and sat down on the second plastic chair. It creaked alarmingly but she didn’t seem too concerned, and it didn’t break anyways.

“It isn’t?” I asked, eyebrow raised. Unhelpfully, I had no innate knowledge on this. But it seemed to me that if you were going to be doing literal magic, it would be coming from the person doing it. Where else would it come from?

Amahle wrinkled her nose and shrugged slightly. “Well. Sort of. It’s not exactly cut and dried,” she said and snorted at the aggravated sigh I let out, because _of course_ this wasn’t going to be straightforward at all.

“High magic- that comes from within you, as far as I can tell. We didn’t go in depth on the theoretical aspect, just enough for me to start basic spells,” she explained.

“No, of course not,” I grumbled, wanting to shake my past self really, _really_ hard, “Because that might actually be useful to me right now.”

“Well, I’m only teaching you low magic anyways, trying to teach you high magic might get the pair of us blown up, since I don’t know much. Low magic, that comes from the world around you. Living things, especially,” Amahle said and reached out to touch a flowering vine that had taken over a large portion of the side of her home. It was blink and you miss it, but I could have sworn the little white bud glowed the faintest bit under her fingers.

“I’m no gardener, but that’s part of the reason I chose to live out here. Magic thrives in nature. Most herb witches don’t live in the city because it’s harder to do magic when there’s less of this around you,” she said, gesturing to the rambling, wild garden around us.

“A lot of low magic involves potions too,” she continued, “And it goes better if you use stuff that’s been grown under your own hands, it sort of _knows_ you in a sense, so that’s handy too.”

“Does all of it use plants?” I asked dubiously. If I was looking to use low magic to protect myself in the event of bumping into Alvarez and Nguyen, I hardly had the time to do a spot of gardening and tell them to hold off on killing me or whatever dastardly plans they had for me while I waited for my little magic garden to sprout.

Thankfully, Amahle shook her head.

“Nope, though you can find ways to enhance spells using potions that don’t require one. And it’s not like you can’t use other people’s plants. It’s just a bit easier, comes more naturally. So first thing’s first. You need to feel the magic,” she said and tucked her feet up on her chair, settling her chin on her knees, like she was just expecting me to do something with just that.

“I have to ‘feel the magic’?” I said flatly, hoping I’d at least get a little clarification. Just saying the words made me feel stupid.

If Amahle felt any similar embarrassment it didn’t show, since she just smiled and nodded and didn’t say anything further.

I frowned at her, but closed my eyes nonetheless, since that seemed like the sort of thing I should do, and tried to focus and... feel the magic.

The sun was warm on my face. A bug of some kind bounced repeatedly on a window, an irritating whining buzz followed by a consistent tap. The air smelled like freshly cut grass and wet dirt. In the distance, a car honked its horn.

I squeezed my eyes shut tighter and ground my teeth in irritation. _Focus_. I had to focus.

A small gust of wind brought up goosebumps on my skin. A dog barked. Plants rustled and a crow cawed loudly, almost mocking me.

With an inaudible growl, my eyes snapped open.

“This isn’t working,” I growled at Amahle and then immediately felt embarrassed. She was just trying to help. It wasn’t her fault I wasn’t getting it.

Before I could apologize, Amahle burst into laughter.

I sat back on my chair, muscles relaxing in confusion and just gestured helplessly at her.

“S-sorry,” she said, still snickering, “It’s a bit of a tradition to anyone wanting to learn the art. My grandmother did the same thing to me. B-but your face! Priceless.”

“Gee thanks, I’m only trying to find a way to not get my ass killed,” I grumbled, not seeing the humour in it.

Okay, maybe I did a little.

Still, Amahle sobered up right away.

“Okay, being serious now,” she said and slipped from her chair to sit on the ground and added “You get down here too.”

I couldn’t help but wonder if Amahle was messing with me again. I sat my ass down on the ground anyways, grass tickling my palms.

“Give me your hand, whichever you write with,” she said, holding her right hand palm up.

I put my left hand in hers, palm down. Gently she took me by the wrist and pushed my palm down into the grass, her hand pressing down firmly on the back of my hand.

“Close your eyes again,” she said and did the same.

Prepared for another trick, I still followed suit, shifting slightly in the mildly awkward position this put my body in.

“Everything has a pulse,” she said after a long, drawn out moment. “So does magic. First you’ll feel the spark. Then feel the magic. Then feel how it moves, like the tide, like the blood in your veins.”

I sat there, feeling a bit foolish, dirt getting ground into my sweatpants and a mosquito buzzing in my ears. Then _warmth_ , sudden and sharp. I nearly jerked my hand away, but Amahle’s held me in place. It wasn’t painful, just surprising. It was like when I’d touched the rough spot on the secret drawer in my apartment, but somehow warmer and less electric. The warm feeling spread out, like I had my hand on the side of an animal rather than an ember. It grew less sharp, but rose and fell in intensity. It wasn’t just under my hand, it was in the grass under my legs and in the yard around us in every blade of grass and tiny white flower and the clumsy bumblebee buzzing by, and even the air I was breathing in, charged and warm and _ready_.

Against my own volition, my eyes flicked open.

Amahle was smiling at me, her own eyes also open.

“That wasn’t so bad was it?” she asked, smile widening.

“That’s amazing,” I said, even as my awareness of the warmth diminished. It was still there, but it was like seeing something at the periphery of my eyesight, less noticeable until I specifically looked for it.

“Didn’t take you too long either,” she said and let my hand go, sitting back to lean against the wall of her house. “Thought that’s probably because you’re learning it a second time.”

“Okay, I felt the magic,” I said, mirroring her and sitting back comfortably. “How is this useful?”

“Hey, slow down, normally this stuff is taught over weeks. We should get some water in you before anything else,” she said and stood up with a groan, back popping.

“Why, we just had breakfast? I’m fine,” I said with a frown. Though, now that I thought about it, my throat did feel a bit dry.

Amahle gave me an amused look and said, “Actually, it’s been a solid hour. Maybe closer to two.”

I jerked back in surprise. Upon inspection, the sun did appear to be in a different position in the sky. That was just freaky.

“What the hell?” I said in disbelief. It seriously felt like we’d only stepped outside ten minutes previous.

“Magic can distort how you sense the passage in time, especially when you’re focusing like that, and especially especially when you’re still learning control,” Amahle said and offered me a hand up.

It was kind of comical, what with me being so much taller than her, but I wasn’t at 100% yet and actually needed the help to get to my feet. We walked back inside, dusting grass off our pants and sat back down in the kitchen. Amahle shot the clock on the wall a look, and I knew that she, like me, was calculating how long Ross had been gone. It was much too long.

“I’ll make tea,” she said, a bit too forcefully, and marched over to the electric kettle on the counter. “There’s one my grandmother used for concentration and memory-making. It should help speed things up. If I can remember it.” She snickered at her own joke and pulled several tins out of a cupboard and set them on the counter next to the sink.

“What are we doing next?” I asked, standing up to wobble over to the cabinet to fetch us mugs. Amahle swatted at me, so I sat down with the mugs before I could anything else tea-related.

“We’ll start with protective spells,” she said and sat back down, kettle heating up.

“Like a shield or something?” I asked.

Amahle shook her head. “No, that’s not something I know how to do. More like chance spells- ones to make it more likely for people to miss when they try to hurt you, make getting hit with magic less effective, make you harder to spot in the dark. That sort of thing.”

I nodded, though inwardly I was frowning. All of what she was saying sounded useful, but I’d been kind of hoping for some sort of magical bubble. Or a shield, that would have been fine too. Then Nguyen couldn’t ever hurt me with that dragon eye thing again. Apparently that had been a bit much of me to expect.

The kettle boiled, and clicked off and Amahle got up to deal with it. She bustled around, dumping the water into a tea pot and then opening several metal tins and adding a few pinches from each into the pot. She gave it a stir and then brought it to the table, setting it down with a crisp clack.

“We just need to give it a few minutes to steep,” she said and glanced at the clock again. A worried look flickered across her face, but she quickly smoothed it away quickly, like she was afraid I’d lose my head at her being worried about our mutual friend.

I lifted the lid of the teapot to sniff it curiously, getting a puff of steam directly in my eyes.

“It’s black tea with lemon, ginger and a bit of rosemary,” Amahle said, grinning at me when I rubbed my face in irritation.

“Rosemary doesn’t sound like it belongs in tea,” I said doubtfully. I squinted at the teapot suspiciously, just to make Amahle snicker.

“Only a little bit, you won’t even be able to taste it. Rosemary’s supposed be good for improving memories, lemon for clarity and ginger for openness. It’s not really a spell. Or not in any way that matters,” Amahle said at my intrigued look, “You’d need words for that. And you have to be careful when inventing a spell, it might have unforeseen consequences, or be more powerful than you meant it to be. Herbs can do a bit on their own though, so it can’t hurt.”

“For memory, huh,” I said, staring at the pot as Amahle poured us each a cup. That might be useful to know later.

We sat in silence for a while, just drinking our tea and trying not to think about Ross too much. Or that might have just been me. My thoughts ended up drifting towards the influx of letter’s I’d gotten yesterday.

I had no idea who T was, and the letters weren’t written to me- but I felt so much from them, like I was a cup with too much poured into it, water dripping down the sides. I wanted to find this person and wrap them in a warm blanket and pour Amahle’s happy soup down their throat. I wanted to find their Aster and wrap them in a blanket too, since I was sure they needed it just as much. T was so in love, and desperately wanted to be with Aster, but more than that wanted Aster to be safe and happy, even at their own expense. This person deserved so much, and I just _wanted_.

I was jolted out of my thoughts by the scrape of Amahle’s chair on the tile floor. She stood and dumped her empty mug in the sink.

“So we’ll start with a basic protection oil,” she said and dragged an enormous plastic bin out from a cabinet over to the table.

“Oil?” I asked and looked into the bin when she pulled the lid off. It was filled to the brim with what I assumed was herbs, some dried and wrapped in plastic, several metal tins stacked on top of each other, as well as numerous plastic containers filled with indistinguishable plant bits.

Amahle nodded and began to dig through the bin. It was a miracle that she seemed to know what each thing held; most of the containers were unlabeled. She must have had some serious memorization skills.

“Yes, you could do it by burning the plants and inhaling the smoke, but this way it makes the protections long lasting and not a onetime thing, so they’re ready when you need them,” she explained and expertly set a series of containers on the table next to the teapot.

“How long will it last?” I asked and accepted the mortar and pestle Amahle shoved at me without looking up from the bin. While I wanted something I could use at a moment’s notice, since Nyguyen was hardly going to give me a heads up before incinerating me, I also didn’t like the sound of this being permanent. What if I needed to not have magic on me for some reason?

“It’s most potent when the oil is still wet, but it will work until you wash it off, or it wears off,” Amahle said and sat up, setting one last bundle of plastic wrapped dried leaves on the table.

“This is a basic one that is based on an old warrior spell,” she said, opening the lids on each, “Normally low magic has a specific intent behind each spell; what it needs to protect you from, makes it more powerful, but we don’t know what you’re up against specifically, so that’s right out.”

“And it will work?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Yes, I’ll do it this time, and show you how to do it on your own if you ever have to,” Amahle said.

We started by grinding each of the herbs up individually, rinsing the mortar and pestle with water Amahle said she’d collected from a stream on a full moon.

“It’s a pretty old tradition, but grandma said it was the best way to get the magic’s blessing,” she said.

She put each ground up herb in the bowl one at a time, explaining what each of them were as the room started to fill with the smell of green and I could feel the warm prickle of magic around us.

“Unicorn root for protection, wild celery to ward against malicious magic, amaranth to protect against bullets, blessed thistle for hex breaking,” she narrated, adding each one without ceremony. If I hadn’t known better, and couldn’t feel the magic building slowly around us, I would have thought she was playing another joke on me, since so far it looked like the results of a kid playing cook in the forest with weeds as make believe ingredients. “Agar for games of luck or chance,” she added with a wink and then darted across the kitchen to root around in a cupboard. She returned with a small spice bottle and gave it a hefty shake over the bowl. “And allspice for extra luck and to boost the spell’s power.”

I looked down into the cheery yellow plastic bowl. It seriously looked like the contents of a lawnmower with a bit of spices sprinkled on top. “Please tell me I don’t have to drink this.”

Amahle snorted as she put the allspice away. “God no. I mean, what I’m best at is kitchen magic, like that soup, so I could probably invent _something_ that would have the same effect, but what we just made isn’t for eating.”

She returned to the table with a bottle of oil and handed it to me.

When I blinked at her in confusion she said, “The next part is on you, since it’s for your own protection it’ll work better if you do this part. Just pour the oil clockwise over the herbs until there’s more oil than plant and concentrate on what you want the spell to do. When there’s enough state your intent, it doesn’t matter what words you use, just the meaning behind them.”

I took the lid off and started to pour the oil in a slow but steady stream.

The spell was to protect me against magic. It was to stop me from getting hurt by any means used against me.

My arm completed one full loop of the bowl and I could feel the warmth of the magic seeping into my hands from the air. It felt like I was weaving the first few twists of a braid, the spell smooth against my skin.

I wanted to be able to stand firm when I saw Nguyen and Alvarez again. I wasn’t going to feel so weak and helpless when they attacked me. I was going to face them and survive.

A second circle was ended. The oil shimmered unusually in the afternoon light filtering through the kitchen window. The spell was a sturdy braid under my fingertips.

Even if I was alone when I saw them again, even if they were with other Durand thugs, or if Mria Yansi was on my heels, I would be safe, by my own hands.

I ended the third circle and set the bottle down. The contents of the bowl looked brighter than they should have even in the brightly lit kitchen. Closing my eyes, I pressed both hands on either side of the bowl. The plastic felt pleasantly warm to the touch, like it had just come out of the dishwasher.

“ _Omnem virtuem oster derit_.”

I felt the final knot of the braided rope as it knotted itself tightly.

Amahle looked startled, dark eyes wide and thin eyebrows raised in surprise.

“Not quite what I go for, but it seems to have worked,” she said and gently took the bowl from my lax fingers.

“What do you usually say?” I asked as she set the bowl on the counter and covered it with a tea towel.

“Something in English for a start,” she said wryly, “I have no idea what you just said, but I assume it was about protecting you, since the spell certainly has a charge. What day is it?”

“You’re asking me?” I asked sardonically. I probably knew what day it was last week, but ever since my apartment had been broken into I’d been running or escaping or healing and the days had sort of melded together with brief periods of unconsciousness.

Amahle seemed to realize that herself and snorted and peered at a calendar hanging on the kitchen wall.

“Well, it’s a waxing moon, good for this sort of thing. We’ll set it outside in the moonlight to settle,” she said and sat back down at the table. “Next we’ll do the offensive spell.”

“But Amahle, I haven’t even insulted you,” I said, widening my eyes in faux shock.

She threw a damp dish towel at me and rolled her eyes. “Hardy har, Mr. Jokester. Just for that you get to wipe down the table while I get a few other things ready.”

Accepting this task, I stood up with a bit of a wobble and tried to quickly hide from Amahle, but utterly failed when she shot me a narrow look.

“Are you feeling dizzy? This can wait until you’ve rested up again, don’t push yourself,” she said, coming back across the kitchen towards me.

I waved her off. Something was telling me I needed this done ASAP. Or it could just have been my newfound crippling fear of coming into contact with Alvarez and Nguyen powerless.

“I’m okay, just a bit tired. I’ll take a nap after this, I swear,” I said when it looked like she might attempt to bodily haul me out of the kitchen back to her spare room. Given how wobbly I still felt, it was less difficult than it should have been for a woman with her height and musculature.

After surveying me intensely for a long moment she sighed but gave in, saying, “Alright, but you tell me the _second_ you feel dizzy or anything. Magic can seriously wear you out, especially when you don’t know how to be precise with it yet, and you’ve been throwing a lot of it around today.”

I nodded in agreement and tried to peer at whatever she’d taken from the kitchen cupboard. It wasn’t glowing exactly, or at least it wasn’t to the visible eye, but it felt like it was glowing magically speaking, radiating unseen energy. But not wildly. It still felt like a woven band of magic within the gently buzzing field of magic that surrounded the house. All of which really didn’t make a whole lot of goddamn sense, but that was what it felt like.

“It’s for the spell,” she said when she saw me trying to look at the object in her hands. “This one won’t be a potion one, but it’s also something I’m coming up with myself.” she set the thing down on the table. It was a completely ordinary stone, gray and rough and identical to any other rock you could pick up off the ground except for the fact that it felt like a magical beacon that screamed ‘look at me, I’m right here!’, like a neon sign repeatedly flashing.

“That doesn’t seem too useful to use when I’m trying to _not_ get caught,” I said with a raised eyebrow.

“It’s hardly done yet,” Amahle said, “It’s something I was experimenting with. A few months ago you asked me to find a way to make our own Dragon’s eyes, using whatever magic I could, low or high, as long as the end result could be used by anyone with any sort of magic background, ranging from you to Ross.”

“Cool. I mean it’s a rock. But a cool one. How does it work?” I asked, tentatively poking the rock. It buzzed lightly against my finger, but didn’t do anything else.

Amahle’s eyes darted away from mine for a brief second. “Oh. Well it isn’t done yet. But when it is... well I guess we’ll find out,” she said, painfully casual.

“So you don’t know, is what you’re saying?” I asked wryly. Amahle glowered at me, a faint blush appearing on her dark skin.

“No. Of course not,” she said irritably, “I mean. Okay, I might not know how _exactly_ it will work, but theoretically it would work like a Dragon’s eye, once it’s ready.”

“So what’s first?” I asked, settling back in my chair. Poking the rock hadn’t hurt me, but sitting so close to it was a bit uncomfortable, like rubbing your skin over a pumice rock repeatedly.

“We need to imbue it with all four elements, then maybe leave it out in the sun when the sun’s at its peak for the day,” she explained, glancing at the clock. “Which is coming up pretty quick. We’ll need to work quickly.”

Fire was the first step.

“Fire is the hardest, most stubborn element to deal with,” Amahle explained, setting the rock in a metal bowl on the table. “It can be hard to light, hard to put out, prone to doing whatever it pleases rather than what you need. So doing it first is best, leaves more ‘space’ so to speak, before the other elements are involved.”

I frowned at the ordinary lighter she held. “It’s a rock,” I said dubiously. “Can that really set a rock on fire?”

“It’s a _magic_ rock,” Amahle stressed, and flicked the lighter on and held it over the rock.

The flame from the lighter flickered over the rock, then grew, like it had touched paper. Amahle flicked the lighter off and pulled her hand back carefully, but the fire didn’t go out like it should have, and instead grew. The pale yellow flames grew large enough to reach out of the bowl and the magic in the room intensified and abruptly everything stopped. The fire went out. The magic subsided. Inside the bowl, the rock still looked like an ordinary rock, albeit one that felt abnormally warm to the touch, like it had been lying under the baking summer sun at noon.

“Water next,” Amahle said and retrieved the water we had used to clean the mortar and pestle when making the protection spell.

I expected it to be less dramatic than the fire. In that it was less showy, I was right. But I was also wrong.

The bowl holding the rock was pretty small and the container she held should have been able to fill the bowl several times over. Yet the steady stream of water Amahle poured in didn’t seem to do more than dampen the rock, much less overfill the bowl. Unlike the previous time, the magic didn’t rise and fill the room with prickling sparks of warmth. Instead, it flowed over us into the bowl, steady and gentle as a wave lazily rolling up the seashore.

When the container of water was empty, Amahle set it down on the table. In the bowl, the rock glistened damply for a moment before becoming dry again.

“Since the spell is being placed on a rock, we don’t need to worry about earth, so we just need to do air next,” Amahle explained and frowned. “Though I’m not really sure how to go about that.”

We sat in silence a full ten minutes, puzzling over it until Amahle shot to her feet with a noise of surprise.

“I’ve got it!”

She darted out of the room and returned with a blow dryer, grinning triumphantly.

I probably should have been skeptical about how a hair dryer could do anything, but since I’d just seen a rock get set on fire and then absorb nearly a liter of water, I held my tongue.

Amahle plugged the hair dryer in and pointed it at the rock and turned the dryer on full blast

I was expecting _something_ to happen, maybe a little light show or something. I was not expecting the rock to shoot out of the bowl at mach five speed and slam into a pot hanging from a rack hard enough to dent it and rebound into the opposite wall, embedding itself into the drywall.

Amahle and I exchanged wide eyed looks.

“Maybe doing this indoors was a mistake,” Amahle said, eyeing the newly formed hole in her kitchen wall.

“At least that was the last step?” I suggested and followed her to cautiously peer at the rock. It still looked like an ordinary piece of stone, albeit one that was stuck into a fist sized hole in Amahle’s house.

“That probably means it worked,” Amahle said and carefully pulled the rock out of the wall. Little bits of plaster and paint rained down after it. There was a crack the size of my forearm that snaked out from the hole diagonally across the ruined drywall, along with several smaller ones like spider webs all around it. A small pile of drywall dust and chips of paint had formed on the floor below the hole. We’d seriously done a number on Amahle’s kitchen.

“Your use of the word probably is really reassuring,” I said and accepted the rock when Amahle handed it to me. For all that it didn’t look any different on the outside, it felt much less noticeable, though somehow touching it was mildly unpleasant, like petting a hedgehog the wrong way.

She sat back down at the table and fiddled with the various things on it, eyes flicking at me several times, but always looking away the second I noticed.

After the fifth time, I finally cracked and asked her what was wrong.

“It’s just weird seeing you like this,” Amahle admitted, eyes darting away from me again.

“What do you mean?”

“I only ever knew you after you’d left Mria Yansi,” Amahle explained and then frowned at me until I sat down again. “So to me, you’ve always seemed... tired? Serious? On edge might be a better way of describing it. We were... we are friends,” she glanced up, like she was expecting me to disagree on this so I nodded quickly in agreement.

“We’re friends,” I agreed. “If only because you aren’t mad about me inadvertently making you trash your kitchen.”

Amahle smiled, palpably relieved- obviously she’d been worried about that for longer than just our current conversation, but hadn’t felt comfortable bringing it up.

“Anyways, we were friends, but we only ever saw each other when you’d been hurt or were so magically drained you couldn’t light a candle, so I probably am not the most objective person... but you seem so much happier like this. Without your memories.

“That’s probably a terrible thing to say. But I’m just worried. About if you get them back, what will happen, how you’ll feel. You rarely opened up to anyone, me, Ross or even Tristan and you never let yourself lean on anyone, you always kept silent about being worried or needing help. That’s why getting you to sit still when you were injured was always so difficult, you always had things to do and people to help and never let us step in when you needed to rest.... Just promise me you’ll come to me after, even if there isn’t anything I can do?”

She looked so sad and concerned, I couldn’t do anything but say, “I promise.”

She nodded, but didn’t look all that convinced.

“So what was I like? Was I like... a magical drill sergeant?” I asked, to distract her.

Amahle hummed consideringly and said with a small laugh, “You were never that bad! You were always pretty serious, and you could get pretty one-track-minded about things sometimes. It was good for when things needed to get done, but it could be a real pain in the ass when you wouldn’t eat or sleep, _especially_ when you were sick or injured.”

“So I’m winning right? Because I’m the bestest patient?” I asked and batted my eyes at her.

She snorted and whacked me with an errant dishcloth. “I wouldn’t go _that_ far, if I had my way you wouldn’t have been doing any magic for another week, but I knew you’d be too stubborn even without your memories to take no for an answer,” she said dryly.

I pouted exaggeratedly. “I’m wounded, Amahle. You hurt me right here,” I said and pointed at my heart.

“That’s the wrong side, dummy,” she replied.

I glanced down, and was embarrassed to realize I was in fact pointing to the wrong side of my chest. Wow, failure thy name is Simon.

“Well,” Amahle continued thoughtfully, “I suppose you are a bit better about listening to me. Normally I wouldn’t have been able to keep you in bed once you could get yourself upright on your own. You’re definitely a lot different now.” At my curious look, she continued, “Obviously I noticed your appearance first, normally you dress a lot more plainly. From what little you told me about Mria Yansi, it’s a pretty strict and old fashioned place, especially with its mages.”

“Really?” I asked skeptically, picking up a lock of my kind of tangled hair. “I would have thought with all this stuff it was kind of like... magic hippie town.”

“I tried to cut your hair once, just a trim, since you had this awful sap stuff stuck in it and it was sticking to your skin and I couldn’t get it out- you nearly took my head off despite not being able to sit up on your own yet,” Amahle laughed. “You told me that mages never cut their hair in Mria Yansi, part of an ancient tradition, supposedly to do with power growing with it or something. You weren’t exactly lucid at that point. When we first met, not long after you escaped Mria Yansi, you kept it in all these complicated braids and buns, took you ages every morning- Tristan said it was another tradition when I asked him. He convinced you to compromise on cutting it by taking the braids out since they might put a target on your back for anyone looking for you.”

“What’s Tristan like?”

“Tristan was your whole world, it seemed like, sometimes,” Amahle said. “He’s kinda like Ross in some ways. They’re sort of two sides of the same coin, I guess. He was sent to Mria Yansi to train when they realized he had high potential as a mage. That’s where you met, you were his teacher.”

“Sounds like an important job. Too bad I don’t have anyone to teach me that stuff now.”

“Not really, you told me that it was more like a punishment. Mria Yansi doesn’t trust the Durand Family, and vice versa. Mria Yansi is closed off to the world, everything I know about them is second hand and most folks only know that they exist and are home to some of the world’s most formidable mages.

“Anyways, you always said training Tristan was the best punishment you’d ever been given, since without him you’d never have left the city.”

Amahle talked a little more about my old life, including a couple stories about Ross’s younger brother Jamie, but I was fading fast and the third time she caught me with my eyes drifting shut she firmly kicked me out of the kitchen and made me go to bed.”

Because of how early I fell asleep, I woke up in the early gray of the morning, with the sun not yet fully over the horizon and the birds starting to call to each other in the garden.

After failing to go back to sleep for what felt like hours but was probably mere minutes, I gave in and crept from my room to the kitchen. Even in the cool predawn light, the kitchen felt warm and welcoming. However cozy the room felt, I still felt fidgety and restless, so I decided to make tea. Amahle would only have gotten home from work a few hours previously, so I did my best to be quiet while rummaging around her kitchen.

It took an embarrassingly long time to find prepackaged tea bags shoved in the back corner of a cupboard- there was no way I was touching Amahle’s unlabeled herbs to make tea like she did, I’d probably poison myself, or get turned into a newt. The electric kettle and tea pot and mug were much easier to find, all where I’d seen them the day before, and by the time I had a hot mug in my hands, dawn was just starting to creep in through the windows. The silence of the house around me made me feel like every noise I made, even my own breathing, were obnoxiously loud and about to wake Amahle up, so I headed outside with my mug.

I sat on one of the plastic chairs on the edge of her overgrown garden we’d used the morning before. It was crazy to think that a full day hadn’t even passed since then. It was even crazier to think that even though it felt like I’d been at Amahle’s for weeks, it had only been three days, one of which I spent almost entirely unconscious.

It made me wonder how long I could reasonably stay here, especially now with Ross was missing. It was less a question of imposing indefinitely on Amahle’s hospitality and more a question of both of our safety. With both the Durand thugs and Mria Yansi agents after me, wasn’t staying here putting Amahle in danger? Ross hadn’t brought me here because he thought it was a good place to lay low, but because I’d been seriously injured in a way he couldn’t fix. I assumed Ross must have had a way to hide our tracks to Amahle, especially since it sounded like I’d been to her home several times, but obviously I hadn’t thought it safe enough to stay at forever.

But if I left, where would I even go? I could hardly return to the city where my ransacked apartment was, and I hardly had the endless supply of mysterious contacts and safe houses that Ross had. Just thinking of my apartment made me think of Opal and Foster, they had to be worried about me up and disappearing for three days.

As I stared at the quickly lightening yard, I wondered if it would be safe for me to text them to let them know I was okay. But what if I could be tracked somehow? Or it lead the people after me to my friends? Ross had said that the Durand family had people everywhere. That was what worried me most, the fact that I had no idea who to trust outside of Amahle and that I could so easily stumble into my enemies since I wouldn’t know how to avoid them. I didn’t even know what the Mria Yansi mages after me looked like, like I did with the Durand trademark boots.

My tea grew cold as the thundercloud in my head grew, so I dumped it in the bushes and went inside for a fresh cup. Sitting outside and brooding was hardly going to solve anything.

Just as I was pouring, I heard a car pull up to the house. Very deliberately and carefully, I set the mug down on the counter with a muted clack.

There were any number of explanations for why someone was driving up to Amahle’s house so early in the morning, but my thoughts were stuck on that thought I’d had about running out of time.

The sound of a car door slamming shut spurred me into action. Silently, I darted down the hall to Amahle’s room and tapped on the door before giving up any sense of privacy and went right in. I shook her awake, a mirror to what she’d done to me the previous morning.

“Amahle, wake up,” I said in a half whisper. I had no idea how well sound carried in her small home and didn’t want to give away my presence to whoever was outside.

Her eyes blinked open and she stared at me sleepily for a long moment before she seemed to snap to full awareness. “Wh-what’s wrong?” She asked through a yawn.

“Someone’s at the door. I’m worried it’s Durand thugs or Mria Yansi.”

She sat upright in a bolt. “Shit. The wards on the house protect anyone inside, but they won’t hold up to heavy firepower. We have to get outside before they force their way in. We should-”

Before Amahle could finish saying what we needed to do, the front door opened, almost comically gently compared to our shared panic.

The two of us stayed frozen where we were, a tableau of fear and horror. There was nowhere for us to go; the hallway was in direct line of sight of the front door, and the only window in Amahle’s room was too small for either of us to squeeze through even if there was enough time.

“Amahle!” A voice called down the hall. A familiar voice. Ross’s voice.

We exchanged a look and the pair of us all but tripped over each other in our rush to get into the hallway.

“Where the hell have you been?” Amahle demanded, looking torn between wanting to hug Ross or slap him. I knew the feeling.

“I have news,” he said abruptly, not even acknowledging Amahle’s question. He was wearing the same clothing he’d been wearing when he’d left and it looked like he’d rolled in a fire pit, ash all over and small burn holes dotting him everywhere. There was a nasty looking scrape on his forehead and a small burn on one of his hands.

“Tristan’s alive,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> how in the fuck did this chapter break 8k what the hell
> 
> normally I dont like to be this person and avoid asking for reviews, but I'd really appreciate any feedback good or bad, it was a little hard finding the wherewithal to edit this monster of a chapter while thinking that no one would actually be reading it/like it


	9. Chapter 9

Tristan. He was the person who I’d been with during my first two years on the run, and possibly the writer of the letters I’d found. I’d tried to ask Ross about him, but then there’d been a whole debacle of the Durand thugs tracking me and Ross having to get our asses out of the city ASAP.

I wanted to ask now, and ask why it was so shocking that he was alive, as it clearly was from the look on Amahle’s face, but Ross and Amahle both sprang into action before I got the chance. And by sprang into action, had a loud argument about whether Amahle was going with Ross to rescue Tristan.

“You aren’t going,” Ross said bluntly. He crossed his arms and glowered at Amahle, somehow managing to look down over his nose at her despite being a good half inch shorter.

“I’m going and you know it, so stop wasting both of our times,” Amahle snapped.

“It’s too dangerous,” Ross argued, expression stony.

“That’s why I’m going!”

The colder and more reserved Ross got, the more heated and angry Amahle got. She paced an agitated few steps in front of Ross, hands punctuating her words with sharp, exasperated motion.

“What exactly are you going to do if you get hurt on this completely insane mission, huh?” She continued.

“What if _you_ get hurt? Not exactly useful for healing us,” Ross replied evenly, a thread of irritation beginning to show in his voice.

“What if Tristan is too injured to be moved? You’ll just bring his corpse back here and hope for the best?”

That really shut Ross up, his cold expression faltering to reveal fear before it smoothed back out to expressionlessness.

“You’ll stay in the car,” he said eventually and, when Amahle started to argue, he added, “If he’s so badly off that I can’t move him from his cell to the car, he’s too badly off for you to heal him; we have to move quick, maybe five minutes inside the compound at most.”

Amahle glowered at him but nodded begrudgingly in agreement and, without a word, went off to pack a bag of medical supplies.

The moment she’d disappeared into the kitchen and began banging around angrily, Ross leant towards me and whispered, “You need to come too; I tried to find a way for this to work without your magic, but nothing was going to be fast enough. I’ll explain what you’ll have to do after we’ve left.” He glanced over to the kitchen where Amahle was still banging cupboard doors open and shut. It sounded like a small hurricane had invaded her kitchen.

After a particularly loud bang, he added, “Maybe you should go wait in the car so she can’t argue about you coming until it’s too late, we can’t waste any more time, we need to leave right away.”

“There’s something I need to grab first,” I said and ducked outside.

The bowl of oil was outside where we’d left it the day before. It had changed dramatically overnight: it was now silvery and glittered oddly, like there were small stars trapped under its surface. It was also noticeably thicker when I poured it into the mason jar we’d left outside along with the bowl.

I screwed the lid on tight and went back to wait by the open front door, waiting for the right moment. A second later, Amahle stormed out of the kitchen and down the hall to the bathroom to rummage around in it equally furiously. I slipped into the kitchen, silently passing Ross who was still in the hallway, digging through a bag. The rock eye was waiting on the table. Unlike the oil, it hadn’t changed overnight. It still looked like an ordinary rock. Touching it, however, revealed its uniqueness. It felt like running a hand over a wire bristle brush and pushing down a bit too hard. I quickly shoved it in my pants pocket, touching it as little as possible.

I still had no idea how to use the thing, but I had a feeling it might come in handy if we were storming some sort of secret magic jail to rescue someone.

With both spells accounted for, I headed back outside and got into Ross’s car. A moment later, Ross emerged from the house, face and arms washed clean, but still wearing the clothing he’d arrived in less than ten minutes previous. Amahle was right on his heels, carrying two bulging bags which were presumably filled with medical supplies, magical and otherwise. She locked the house up and then threw a fistful of glittering sand at the top of the door frame. It was blink and miss it, but I swore I saw a brief flash of green light that encased the entire house.

Ross got into the driver's’ seat and Amahle flung herself into the backseat and was too busy with wrestling her bags into place and getting her seat belt on to notice me until after Ross had started the car and driven to the bottom of her long, winding driveway.

“No,” she said bluntly, staring at me through the rear-view mirror like she could get me out of the car through sheer force of will.

“I need him for this,” Ross said calmly like Amahle wasn’t about to turn the murder glare on him next. Ross had much thicker skin than I had, or else some serious acting skills.

“He’s not even fully recovered,” Amahle snapped. I was pretty sure that if Ross hadn’t been driving the car she was in, Amahle would have attempted to strangle him. Or turn him into a frog if it was more painful.

“I feel fine,” I protested, mostly at the prompting look Ross shot me. It was mostly the truth too. I felt kinda tired, like I’d stayed up too late, even though I’d slept a solid 12 hours.

“That’s nice, I want you to stay that way for more than half a day, for once,” Amahle all but growled at me. But she still sat back with an aggravated huff, apparently resigning herself to the situation since the only solution available to her by that point was to forcibly eject either me or Ross from the car. Probably the only reason she didn’t was that it would be counterproductive in keeping us from getting hurt.

We drove in silence for the better part of an hour before Ross muttered, “Dassa’s tits, I’m tired. Amahle, I need you to drive for a bit.”

From the backseat, Amahle gave him a look of equal parts concern and dry exasperation.

“Have you even slept since we last saw you?” she asked as Ross pulled the car over at a rest stop.

“Probably.”

Amahle was not amused in the slightest.

Amahle got into the driver’s seat and I climbed into the passenger seat so Ross could take advantage of the back seat to stretch out, already nearly asleep before the car was in motion.

“Where exactly am I driving us?” she asked as she got the car back on the highway.

“Just wake me up when we hit Lumier Lake, we’ll get lunch and I’ll explain what the plan is,” he slurred and promptly fell asleep before Amahle could get any further details from him.

She made an irritated noise, but quietly so as to not wake Ross up. I grinned at her, but smothered it when she made the same noise in my direction.

“So how exactly do I use this stuff?” I asked softly, picking up the jar of protective oil from the floor. “Also did you name it? Protective oil sounds... _dirty_.” I made a face and felt a little thrill of triumph when this finally managed to crack Amahle’s serious expression.

“When we stop for lunch, I’ll show you how I intended it to work, I based the concept off of a warrior’s spell, though we’ll see if that works. And I haven’t named it, maybe that should wait after we’ve seen exactly what it can do.”

I glanced down at the jar. The contents almost looked like bottled moonlight, but also like it was in constant, gentle motion, like river water at night, patches lightening and darkening in turn.

“It’s pretty.”

“Well hopefully it’s pretty and useful and completely unnecessary for today.”

I set the jar back down on the floor carefully and leant back in my seat. I meant to stay awake and keep Amahle company, but the soft snores coming from the back seat and the gentle hum of the engine lulled me to sleep.

It felt like no time at all before Amahle nudged me awake. It took me a few seconds to realize the car wasn’t moving anymore, and that we were parked in the farthest corner of a parking lot of what must have been a grocery store.

“Ross went to get us lunch,” she explained, “While we wait, I’ll show you how to use the protection oil.”

I nodded and rubbed clumsily at my eyes, trying to shake the cobwebs loose out of my brain. We climbed out of the car and sat down on a scrubby patch of grass at the edge of the parking lot, the jar of oil glittering between us.

“Ideally you’d use a brush for this, or a wand-”

“Wait witches actually use wands?” I couldn’t help but interrupt excitedly.

“Not much anymore, it’s a pretty old tradition and wandmaking isn’t very common nowadays so actually finding a wand that’s right for you can be tough. But yes, some people do. I have my grandmother’s old one for certain spells that work better with one,” Amahle said and removed the lid from the jar. Even without putting my face up to the jar, I could faintly smell the scent of flowers and saltwater.

“You’re going to draw this symbol on the underside of your wrists, the base of your neck and the soles of your feet.” She produced a crumpled receipt from her purse along with a stub of a pencil and scribbled on it quickly before handing it over.

The symbol didn’t look terribly complicated, kind of like an exceptionally loopy capital GK, but drawing it on my neck without seeing what I was doing would be tricky.

“My feet?” I asked skeptically. Amahle wasn’t the sort of person to joke around when things were this serious, but I couldn’t help but wonder if she was messing with me again.

“The old spell was to shield you wherever you go, whatever you do and whatever you see,” she explained. “Feet, hands, head.”

Accepting this, I nodded and dipped my finger into the jar. The oil didn’t feel especially magical, except for feeling a lot thicker than it had been when originally made and seriously slippery.

I started with the easiest, toeing off my shoes and socks and tried to copy the symbol from paper to my feet. It took me three attempts to get it right on my first foot, but the second I got on the first try. I did my wrists next, first my right and then much more awkward and slowly for my left. That only left my neck.

“Are you sure you can’t do this for me?” I asked hopelessly as I tried to pull my hair out of the way without using my oily fingers. I could feel unused oil dripping down my wrists and dripping onto my shirt and my hair. Magic or not, it was seriously unpleasant.

Amahle looked faintly amused and said, “Sorry you have to do it, it probably won’t work if I did it.”

I wrinkled my nose at her in irritation, but got to work. I got what felt like half the jar of oil down the back of my borrowed shirt my first attempt. The only bright side was that it was one of the old ones I’d left with Amahle pre-amnesia and not one of my new ones.

I went more slowly the second attempt and nearly had it when my arm abruptly cramped from the awkward angle and made my fingers jerk across the nearly complete symbol, ruining it. I was about ready to chuck the entire damn jar of oil across the parking lot, but Amahle just snickered and passed me a napkin to wipe off with, so I grit my teeth and tried a third time.

I knew I’d finally gotten it right when I took my fingers away and all five symbols began to tingle, feeling cold, like the sensation of drinking water after chewing mint gum, only on my skin. It faded quickly, leaving me covered in goosebumps. Curiously I examined the symbol on one of my wrists. The oil had dried after I’d finished the last symbol, and it had darkened slightly, glittering silver against my skin. I cautiously rubbed a finger against one line, but it didn’t fade or smudge, almost like a tattoo. A little alarmed, I rubbed at it harder, not caring that I’d have to redo it if I succeeded. It still remained unchanged.

“Uh, Amahle, you said this was temporary, right?” I asked, a little shrill. What if the spell didn’t work as it was supposed to, or hurt me? I needed to be able to get it off me if something went wrong!

Frowning, Amahle took my arm and bent her head to look at the symbol closely, her braids sliding over her shoulder, blocking her face from view. After a long moment she sat back and released me arm, a small frown on her face.

“No spell lasts forever,” she said at length. “It will fade with time or use. Though since we don’t know what those words you said meant...” The word ‘probably’ hung unsaid in the air between us.

We were still sitting in contemplative silence when Ross emerged from the grocery store, a couple plastic bags hanging from his arms.

He still looked tired and rumpled but seemed awake enough when he sat down next to us. His eyes caught on my glittering wrist and raised an eyebrow questioningly

“To protect me,” I said and bit down on the urge to add ‘theoretically’ like I wanted to. Ross already looked stressed enough, he didn’t need to hear about my potentially dangerous and maybe irreversible spell.

Ross handed out the food he’d purchased, and we ate in silence. Both Amahle and Ross looked tired, chewing mechanically. I wished I could offer to drive so they could both sleep, but I wasn’t sure if I knew how to drive and had forgotten, or if I’d never learned. That seemed like a kind of important skill to have if you were constantly on the run, but that wasn’t something I wanted to bet on.

When we were all finished, Ross spread a map out between us and said, “Tristan is being held by the Durand Family in one of their smaller compounds three hours south of us. I have no idea why they haven’t ransomed him back to Mria Yansi yet; my source says he’s been there since they caught him four months ago.

“I’m going to leave the car here,” Ross said and pointed to a section of road deep in the mountains. “You’re going to wait for us in the car with your supplies, Amahle.”

She glowered at this, but didn’t interrupt him, though her expression said she dearly wanted to.

“If anyone sees you, you’re going to take the car and get the hell out of there.” He held a hand up to forestall her wordless angry noise of protest. “ _And_ ,” he stressed. “Meet us here.” He pointed to a different road that the first connected to, a couple of kilometers away. “There’s no cell service anywhere in the valley, and since our friend here doesn’t know how to do any of the high magic spells we used to use to communicate, we’re out of that option too. This means that everyone has to stick to the plan as closely as possible.” He moved his finger to an area between the two roads, a seemingly empty patch of forest according to the map. “This is where the compound is. It only has a skeleton crew of people there, apparently something big is going down with the Durand Family right now, so this is our best shot before more people can be spared to guard the place. The compound is surrounded by the forest on three sides and has a fairly steep hill off the side that has no cover, which is where the road leading to it is located.

“We,” he gestured to himself and me. “Will sneak up through the forest on the south side from where Amahle is parked. There’s a single window on that side, which leads into the basement. We’ll enter the house there, get Tristan and get back out that way too.” Ross finished speaking and nodded at Amahle, gesturing for her to speak her peace since she’d let him finish.

“Great plan except for the part where you didn’t explain how the hell you expect to wander around a Durand compound without getting caught and bringing down every thug in the area on our heads,” she said wryly.

Rather than be annoyed, Ross merely looked faintly amused and a little sad. “With this,” he said and produced... _something_ from one of his many pockets. The object almost looked like fabric, almost entirely see-through and filmy, but it was much too insubstantial to even be the thinnest silk ever woven. It was like he’d taken a piece of cloud from the sky, stretched it thin, and dyed it a mottled green nearly the colour of the pine trees behind us.

“What is it?” I asked and went to touch it, but Ross smacked my hand away. Amahle raised her eyebrows at it, but had more sense than I did and didn’t reach out to it.

“An unnoticeable spell you made,” Ross explained, tucking the thing back away. “You made it years ago as a spare and hid it at a safe house near here. I’m not sure what happened to your original, but this one is keyed to you, so I can’t use it, so you’ll have to come with me to use it on both of us while we’re inside the compound.”

“I don’t like this,” Amahle said, crossing her arms tightly.

“How do I even use it?” I asked at the same time.

“That’s too bad, it’s the only plan I’ve got. It’s not like I like it much either, but it’s this or do nothing,” Ross said to her and then added to me, “And I’ll show you when we get there, you’ll only be able to use it for a few minutes at a time.”

That said, we gathered all of our things up and got back in the car, Ross driving this time, with Amahle laying down to sleep in the back.

The drive was long and unremarkable and I’d nearly fallen asleep again despite not being all that tired, when Ross pulled the car over. We’d gone from a moderately busy highway to a less busy country road to a bumpy gravel road winding through the mountains. Ross had pulled over at what looked like a small parking lot in the middle of nowhere with several trails leading from it into the bushes; probably for hiking. The sun was low in the sky, casting long shadows from the trees. The forest surrounded us on all sides and looked dark and a bit ominous, though that might have only been because I knew there was a dangerous magic gang compound hidden within it. I hoped our little hike wouldn’t be very long.

“There are several hiking trails here, so the average person will think that’s why you’re here,” Ross explained to Amahle. “But if you see anyone who might be-”

“I’m not stupid!” She snapped irritably and then yanked him into a tight, fierce hug before shoving him away and treating me to the same. “Be safe,” she whispered in my ear, then let go and got back in the car, face turned away from us. I got the impression she might have been crying. Ross had noticed too, going by the tight set of his jaw, but he didn’t say anything and led me to one of the trails.

“The Durand Family sets up wards and traps, magical and normal around their compounds, so you’ll need to follow _exactly_ where I go since I have a map of where they are along with where their patrols tend to go. We’ll use the unnoticeable spell when we’re right on the edge of where they patrol so we use it as little as possible, but I’ll teach you the incantation for it now: _omnis pra omni_.”

Dutifully, I repeated the words until Ross was satisfied with my pronunciation and he led us into the forest proper.

Just as I expected, it was dark under the tree branches, as well as damp and eerily quiet. The first portion of our little hike was easy enough; the trail was packed down smooth and fairly flat. We walked in silence for nearly twenty minutes when Ross took us off the main path and onto a little goat trail, explaining that we were now on the very edge of Durand territory and that this was where the wards and traps would start popping up and he pulled out a hand drawn map with multiple symbols written all over.

At first I didn’t notice anything different, aside from the narrower, less groomed trail, but slowly I could feel the difference. It felt like someone was staring at the back of my head, but no matter how many times I turned to look back, I didn’t so much as see a bird. After five minutes of this, I was abruptly seized by a need to turn back. I didn’t belong there. I had to leave immediately.

“It’s okay,” Ross said in a hushed voiced when I yanked on his sleeve to grab his attention, too far gone for words. All my focus was devoted to not turning around and running in the direction we’d come.

“It’s just the wards,” he explained softly, “They don’t know we’re here, they have this effect on anyone who comes this way. Just bear with it a little longer and then we can use the unnoticeable spell and it will null the effects.”

I grit my teeth and we continued on, with me flinching at every tree branch that brushed my shoulder and compulsively looking back behind us every other ten seconds. Ross seemed unaffected, if a little tense around the shoulders. I was seriously jealous given it felt like I was about to go insane.

Luckily we only went another five minutes further before he stopped us at a point where the trail dipped downhill abruptly. He produced the moss green cloud-fabric and handed it over.

“We need to stay in physical skin-to-skin contact for it to work on both of us,” Ross added, voice barely audible.

Holding it, it felt like I’d plunged my hands into ice water, my fingers abruptly cramping with cold. I had to concentrate on not letting my teeth chatter as I whispered, “ _Omnis pra omni._ ”

The green cloud lifted out of my hands and spread itself translucent thin and settled across my head and draped across my shoulders and down past my toes. I could still see and hear clearly, but everything had a gentle green tint to it and it felt like there was a soft weight on my entire body. Ross groped around like he couldn’t see me before he found my hand with his. The fabric stretched to accommodate his body too, and the weight it felt like I was carrying increased to something akin to a slightly over full backpack- nothing I couldn’t handle, just somewhat uncomfortable.

Ross led us forward like that, body angled so we could still walk single file on the narrow path. He set a fairly quick pace, but took the time to avoid certain patches of ground and trailing tree branches, so I made sure to follow suit.

I no longer felt like I was being watched, or like I needed to leave the forest, but I knew I felt something different still. It took me another couple minutes to realize I couldn’t hear the sound of my own soft footsteps on the ground, or Ross’s. I couldn’t even hear my own breathing. That made me panic, digging my heels into the ground, gasping for breath since my brain wasn’t convinced I was still breathing despite my chest expanding and contracting as usual.

Ross whirled around, obviously expecting an attack of some kind. He seemed to realize what was wrong and just tugged me forward to keep moving.

The trail seemed to go on forever and by that point it was nearly pitch black under the dense trees, making me clumsy as the trail dipped and curved seemingly at random. Just as I was starting to wonder if Ross was taking us in circles, we broke into a clearing.

A large three storey cabin sat at the center, the last rays of sunlight glinting off the upper edges of the attic windows near the peak of its gabled roof. It looked alarmingly cutesy for a hellish prison.

Without hesitation, Ross headed across the clearing, making a beeline for the far side of the cabin. With a shiver, I noticed that as we left the dark of the forest, we didn’t even cast shadows.

We slipped around the side of the cabin and then froze as a person left the treeline, heading in the exact opposite direction, right towards us. Ross’s hand squeezed mine, almost painfully tight. The woman, clearly marked as a Durand with her visible tattoo on her bicep and trademark heavy black boots, didn’t notice us, her stride not faltering as she passed us, so close I could have reached out to touch her shoulder.

Once she disappeared around the corner, we continued on around the massive cabin. A wave of dizziness hit me as we reached the window Ross had mentioned. He looked at me quizzically but I just shook it off.

He produced something from his pocket and had me put my hand on his neck so he had both hands free to set to work on the window. I thought it must have been magic or something, since all he had to do with the device was tap it on the window and the glass shattered inwards, silently. It was awkward not letting go of each other, but we managed to get through the window with only minimal delay and a couple of minor scratches from the broken glass.

Ross seemed to know exactly where to go without consulting his little map and took us through the maze of the dim basement and up a flight of stairs without hesitation. We passed three separate people going about their business, but none of them even batted an eye at us inching past them while I froze each time, convinced they’d notice. By the time we got to the top floor I was nearly used to it and dizzy enough to be tripping over my own feet. My hands felt like blocks of ice and my skin crawled under the fabric of the spell.

Ross had to have noticed, especially with one of my freezing hands in his, but he set to work picking the lock on one of the rooms on the narrow top floor without more than a glance in my direction

After only a little bit of work on his part, the door swung open.

The room was empty.

Ross’s eyes went wide and he yanked me into the room and pulled the door most of the way shut behind us, leaving it unlatched.

“Take the spell off,” Ross mouthed, exaggerating the motion when I didn’t understand the first time.

For a moment, I panicked. Ross hadn’t told me how to undo the spell and I’d been too stupid to ask _before_ I’d used it! Then I calmed down and tried to focus, like I had in Amahle’s garden. There was less magic in the room than in the garden, but I could feel the concentration of it around us, then feel the difference between the fabric-like texture of the unnoticeable spell and the softer magic of the protection spell, and the random thick-thin-rough-soft of the natural ambient magic. Experimentally, I ‘peeled’ them apart, leaving the protection spell alone and the unnoticeable spell folded back on itself, spooling back into my open palms.

I shivered at the abrupt change in temperature and absence of pressure that had accompanied the spell. A headache began to pound behind my eyes.

“Tristan was supposed to be in this room,” Ross said, pacing a tiny circle and tugged an agitated hand through his hair. “I’m pretty sure they haven’t had time or the manpower to move Tristan to a different location, so either my information was wrong and he was never here, or he was moved to a different room for some reason.”

“How sure is pretty sure?” I asked.

“About 50/50,” Ross admitted. “Trying to find Tristan like this would be dangerous.”

After a moment I said, “Well, it already is dangerous. And we’re here now as it is. What’ going to happen to him if we leave him here?”

“They’ve kept him alive this long, so either they need information that he hasn’t given up yet, or they’re negotiating a payment from Mria Yansi for him.”

“But they won’t kill him?”

“No.” Ross looked away from me; clearly there was something he wasn’t saying here. Or several somethings.

“But that doesn’t mean he’s safe or anything,” I guessed. Bingo: Ross sighed and pursed his lips together.

“No. Neither faction are known for being kind to their prisoners, to put it lightly.”

“And we won’t be able to come back later to get him. So we might as well rescue him,” I said lightly. I had pretty made up my mind when Ross had said Tristan might still be in the cabin: it wouldn’t feel right abandoning someone to the Durand thugs when I had a chance at saving them, no matter how small that chance was or how dangerous it was. I’d only faced Nguyen and Alvarez for less than ten minutes and I’d honestly thought I had been about to die. Being a prisoner would probably make what I’d gone through seem like child’s play. I couldn’t live with myself knowing that I’d just let that happen to someone else.

But I figured talking it out with Ross would mean less arguing over if it was too dangerous, and therefore waste less time. I was learning a lot from watching him and Amahle and their bickering.

Ross frowned, but gave in and nodded. “Alright. We’ll need the concealment spell after we’ve found Tristan more than we need it now, so we’ll save it for now. We need to be _exceptionally_ careful even if there aren’t many people inside right now.”

I wanted to roll my eyes at him like Amahle would have, but held back because yeah he did have a point, this was suicidal level dangerous. For all that Ross and I each had weapons, we were no match against a bunch of thugs on their home turf. _Especially_ when I had no bloody clue how mine worked or if it did at all.

We slipped back into the hall and then checked the remaining rooms by pressing our ears to the doors and listening carefully; the doors were just cheap wood according to Ross, but cursed on the inside so anyone locked inside couldn’t touch it if the curse was activated.

When we struck out there, Ross led me down the stairs to the second floor, achingly slowly and we stood there for ages until he determined there was no guard waiting for us there. The process of listening at doors was repeated, and I was beginning to lose hope when we reached the second to last door without any luck. If Tristan was on the first floor there was no way for us to get at him without being noticed.

At the last door, Ross looked at me with determination and said almost too quiet to hear, “Be ready, it might not be him.”

He picked the lock like he had upstairs, and within moments the door opened. There was a lump of a person laying on the bed, facing away from us. A dingy white sheet covered most of his body, which trembled intermittently with shivers. There was no source of light in the room, no window and the light bulb had been removed from the ceiling fixture, so Ross left the door open a tiny crack so we could see. He approached the bed with me on his heels, and we both crouched down next to the bed. Gently, Ross rolled the man onto his back. The man groaned, eyes closed. His face was flushed with fever.

“Wake up,” Ross said quietly, expression shaken. “Come on, Tristan we’re getting you out of here, man.”

Tristan groaned again, but obediently opened his eyes. Instead of focusing on Ross, he looked over him to me.  Like the sun breaking out from behind the clouds, he beamed at me, face elated despite how exhausted and sick he clearly was.

“Aster, I knew you’d come for me,” he said, voice shaking, and leant over Ross’s shoulder and kissed me soundly on the mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> its thursday somewhere, right? right.


	10. Chapter 10

I was the biggest idiot on the planet.

Like really, truly and comprehensively the most deeply moronic, deaf, dumb, blind and flat out stupid person to ever live. A complete moron. The sort of idiot who could add two plus two, get five and then pat themself on the back for a job well done. No other person could ever feel embarrassed around me because they could just tell themselves ‘it’s okay at least I’m not that complete fucking lack witted moron who managed to haul around over a dozen love letters and not realize they were addressed to himself all while bemoaning their lack of clues to their past’.

Those letters had been written to me.

My name wasn’t Simon. It was Aster.

At least I wasn’t 0 for 3, I’d obviously gotten one thing right: T was in fact Tristan.

Shockingly enough, this didn’t make me feel a whole lot better about the whole situation.

Tristan pulled back, lips leaving my unresponsive ones.

“What’s wrong, love?” he asked, sagging backwards like he just couldn’t hold himself up anymore. Given how weak he looked, that probably wasn’t too far from the truth. Ross twisted out from between us, expression pained. Tristan looked confused and more than a little lost.  Faintly, I felt like I’d just shot a puppy.

“We don’t have time for this,” Ross growled and hauled Tristan out of bed and more or less upright. If I hadn’t been so completely frazzled, I would have been impressed by this show of strength given how limp Tristan’s body was.

“What’s wrong?” Tristan repeated, eyes not leaving mine, leaning nearly all of his weight onto Ross to stop himself from falling over.

“I will explain in excruciating detail to _both_ of you what is going on, but right now we need to get out of here immediately.”

Without protest, mind still whited out with shock, I let Ross sling Tristan’s other arm across my shoulders and then wrapped my inside arm across Tristan’s back so I could touch Ross’s arm to activate the spell. It was awkward as hell, especially with Ross being the strongest out of the three of us, but also significantly shorter, but we didn’t have time to find a less cumbersome arrangement.

“The spell is going to be a lot harder this time,” Ross warned me once we were in position by the door. “But you’ll only have to hold it until we get to the trees. I’ll take care of things from there.”

I nodded and said for the second time, “ _Omnis pra omni_.”

Ross was wrong. It wasn’t harder. It was excruciating. The spell felt like I was holding rubber stretched to the breaking point over the three of us and the weight of it nearly knocked my legs out from under me. My hands were so cold my fingers went numb all the way to my palms. It felt like I was about to break. Sweat beaded on my face instantly and I was already short of breath like I’d been running, but I nodded to Ross to get us moving.

He obviously noticed my distress, but led us down the hall as quickly as we could manage without dropping Tristan could barely manage to put one foot in front of the other, his head sagging forward limply. The unnoticeable spell was a lifesaver- we were making a hell of a lot more noise exiting than entering. Especially on the stairs when Tristan nearly slipped out of our grip when his legs got tangled in mine and I had to claw at Ross’s arms with my fingernails to stay in contact with him while Ross somehow managed to keep all three of us upright. I felt every noise the spell silenced like it was physical blow, the spell becoming stretched thinner with each heartbeat, the cost of it weighing heavier across my shoulders. I was nearly blind with exhaustion and gasping for air by the time we made our way through the basement to the broken window.

We stood there for a long moment, and it took me a too long to realize why. The window. It had been hell getting just me and Ross through it without letting go of each other. Doing the same with Tristan would be impossible

“Let go of the spell,” Ross mouthed to me, likely not for the first time, and Tristan’s head flopped onto his shoulder as he gazed dazedly at the window.

Gratefully, I did so. It felt like an elastic band snapping back into shape, almost painful in how fast it undid itself. I wheezed at the change and nearly fell over until Ross shouldered more of Tristan’s weight from me and I could get my knees to lock.

“I’ll go first and pull each of you through and then you’ll reapply the spell again,” Ross said grimly. I wanted to cry at the thought of doing that again, but nodded my understanding. We were nearly there.

Ross smoothly pulled himself through the window and then reached in for Tristan, which was a lot more difficult process. It took Ross hauling on Tristan’s upper torso and me shoving at his legs, with Tristan clinging weakly to Ross’s arms, to get him through, nearly knocking Ross on his ass when Tristan’s weight shifted unexpectedly and he fell through like a sack of bricks. When it was my turn, I hissed through my teeth and flung myself at the window, not caring about the glass that scraped at my arms. My eyesight nearly blurred out completely and I had to let Ross pull me the last few inches through to stop me from falling back down through the window again and undoing all my hard work.

We got back into position and I hissed through clenched teeth, “ _Omnis pra omni_.”

My vision went completely black and my legs trembled, but I stumbled blindly after Ross in the direction he pulled us. The spell felt like the weight of the world on my back, and was like stretching cement to fit over all three of us. We were almost there. My whole body felt frozen; Tristan’s arm was painfully hot across my shoulders, Ross’s bicep like burning coals against my fingertips.

We staggered to the treeline like the loser in a drunken three-legged race, the spell shuddering and slipping in my grip. We only had maybe five more steps to go when one of my feet hit a rock, tripping me and I fell, taking Ross and Tristan with me. My concentration slipped and the spell fell apart completely, nearly ripping itself out of my control.

My vision came back, grey and out of focus. Ross hauled both of us to our feet and tried to desperately propel us the last few steps into the woods. It was no use, I heard a shout from behind us and Ross swore violently, breath ragged.

“Take Tristan and run,” he gasped. A Durand thug was running towards us, the one who had passed us earlier, and more were starting to appear from the door of the cabin. He was still on the opposite side of the clearing. If we were fast enough, we had a slim chance of escaping.

“That’s stupid, I can barely hold myself up, much less both of us,” I replied, equally out of breath. “You take him. I’ll do... something. Magic”

We still continued to stagger in the directions of the trees, but the thugs were rapidly gaining on us.

“You’re both stupid, all of us are running. None of us would buy the other two more than a few seconds like this,” Tristan slurred, and with a hiss of pain, stood more firmly on his own and urged us forward.

Ross glowered at me, like it was my fault, but didn’t deny that it wasn’t true. He let go of me and hauled Tristan up over his shoulders, face already going red from exertion and stumbled into a lumbering jog through the trees, not following any path, just going where there was space between the thick undergrowth. I followed after, a dragon eye setting fire to the grass we’d been standing on a bare second later.

The forest was unfamiliar and nearly pitch black without the dying evening sun to guide us like it had on the way to the compound. Within seconds without the unnoticeable spell, the wards activated on us, spurring us to run faster away from the unwelcoming Durand property. It didn’t help much: Ross was only one man, nearing the end of his strength, and Tristan was much taller and heavier than him, and I could scarcely do more than keep up, vision still out of focus.

The Durands plunged into the woods behind us, laughing at us, presumably at our pathetic escape attempt. Dragon’s eyes set fire to the forest, smoke filling the air from the damp, burning wood.

Ross stumbled, Tristan’s weight awkward and making him clumsy. I barely managed to keep them both upright. We stumbled two more wobbly steps before there was a hissing crackle of fire from a dragon’s eye and Ross fell to the ground with a strangled cry, dropping Tristan and clutching at his shoulder. The air smelled of smoke and burning flesh. Neither of them got to their feet.

My fingers clenched around the rock in my pocket. Ross and Tristan were both down and not in any condition to face off with the three Durands emerging through the dim and the smoke. There was muffled crashing and shouts from deeper in the forest, so the rest of them couldn’t be far behind.

“Your luck’s run out now,” the nearest thug growled, arm extended, an eye glowing cruelly from his fist. There was a low crackling sound coming from it, presumably charging up for another volley of fire.

I clutched the rock in my pocket harder. Now was the time from me to suddenly know how to use it. It couldn’t be that hard- Ross had said that Dragon eyes could be used by any idiot, so this thing that was meant to work the same had to be just as easy. I just needed it to do something! Anything!

The thug took another step, quickly closing the distance between us and the eye glowed brighter, lighting up the forest like it was midday, dazzlingly blinding. Fire shot out of it and I ducked, too late, arms curled uselessly over my head and-

The fire swerved impossibly and hit a tree far to my left.

The thug and I both stared at the singed and smoking tree, dumbfounded. It was well away from where he’d been aiming. My wrists were glowing silver, like moonlight trapped under my skin.

The thug stared at me, then at his dragon’s eye, in almost comical betrayal before tossing it aside.

“I knew those things were pieces of shit. Always preferred to work with my bare hands,” he said, a wild grin splitting his face. He looked nothing like Nguyen, lanky and blond where Nguyen had been compact and dark haired, but I couldn’t help the shiver that ran down my spine. For all their differences, their expressions could have been identical. And the tattoo I could see poking out of the hem of his t-shirt.

“I’m going to enjoy this,” he added. “After so long, you and the traitors are finally going to get what’s coming to you.” He looked to Ross, sprawled, panting on the ground part way between us. The thug kicked Ross in the ribs, hard. Ross made a whining noise and pitifully tried to roll away.

“Hey, pay attention,” the thug said with a cackle. “I’m going to take your friend here apart, limb by limb, and there isn’t a damn thing either of you traitors can do about it.”

“Stop it!” I yelled when the man kicked Ross again. My arm jerked up holding my very ordinary stone out, a mockery of the pose the thug had been in before.

The man didn’t seem remotely threatened, eyebrows raised sardonically.  “Don’t worry,” he said and gently patted my cheek, like I was a child. “You won’t be dying tonight, I’ll let Mria Yansi be the one to kill you. They promised us a lot in return for you alive. Can’t say the same about these traitors.”

I had a flash of Nguyen in the hallway outside of my apartment- _sitting on my chest, one hand dragging the dragon’s eye across my collarbone, one hand mockingly stroking my cheer as he said “Darling-”_

“Don’t touch me!” I snarled and slapped his hand away sharply. He laughed and grabbed me by the hair hauling me down to his level so we saw eye to eye.

“After this fucking long I get to do whatever the hell I want with you,” he said and tossed me aside forcefully. He eyed Tristan thoughtfully. “And with this one too, for as much fun as he could be. Or maybe the other, he had to be good for _something,_ for you to have kept defective goods around so long. ” He smirked at Ross’s prone form and made to step towards him.

How _dare_ he.

“Don’t you even look at them!” I snarled and stumbled to my feet. I was going to tear this piece of garbage to pieces with my bare hands if I had to before I let him touch Ross or Tristan. Anger burned cold through my veins and I _grabbed_ the magic pulsing around the stone and _twisted,_ whipped my arm down in an arc. A rope of light burst from my hand, like a whip and slashed the thug, a long ugly slice from shoulder to opposite hip. He gasped and stumbled back, clutching at where his body began to gush blood, but I didn’t give him a chance and whirled my arm around again and again. He screamed, high and shrill, body jerking, blood dripping from his torso. Somehow the rope wrapped around the thug’s torso and I raised my arm above my head, his body mirroring it and floating upwards to brush against the low hanging tree branches. I flung him away like the trash he was. He flew back several feet, taking out one of the other thugs with him in a heap of limbs.

The third man didn’t bother with theatrics or grandstanding and just charged me but I slashed at him with the rope and then leapt forward and punched him in the chest with the hand holding the stone when he didn’t stop going for Ross and Tristan. He fell backwards with a gurgle. I didn’t bother looking to see what happened to him.

There was more crashing in the woods, we had minutes at most before more thugs came. I doubted I’d get lucky and have idiots who stood around and attacked me one at a time again. We had to leave immediately. At this thought the rope of light _unravelled_ and dissipated to nothing and I shoved the stone back in my pocket.

Ross was still gasping on the ground, Tristan motionless next to him, eyes open but unresponsive. Blood was smeared over Ross’s face and made the back of his shirt cling to his skin.

I hauled Ross into a sitting position and ignored his badly muffled cry of pain. I tried to pull him to his feet, but it was quickly obvious that he couldn’t stand on his own and I nearly dropped him.

We didn’t have time for this, the Durand thugs would be on us in seconds and one of the one’s I’d attacked was groaning softly, down but not out.

Fear coiled in my gut, tight enough to knock the breath out of me. I wasn’t the strong one here, I barely knew what was happening and Ross and Tristan were the ones who were supposed to be protecting me. I clenched my eyes shut. What _should have been_ didn’t matter. What did was that I was the only one who could get us out of danger. I had to be strong, for at least a little longer. I hissed a breath through my teeth and opened my eyes. I _would_ be strong.

The five symbols on my body tingled a little, then abruptly burned with cold, like liquid nitrogen against my skin. A wave of energy passed over me head to toe, and when it subsided, I knew what to do.

I hauled Ross over my shoulders like he’d done for me when he’d saved me from Alvarez and Nguyen. Ross sobbed into my shoulder and I felt blood trickle from his body onto mine, but I ignored it in favour of trying to rouse Tristan.

“Get up,” I told him in a hissed whisper. He blinked at me in dull confusion, but didn’t respond otherwise.

“Get up,” I repeated and grabbed him by the forearm. “Get up or we all die here.”

Tristan’s lean form shuddered and he gasped quietly and his eyes began to glow silver. He got to his feet, swaying on the spot.

I felt impossibly strong, like I had all of the power of the noonday sun compressed down into a man-sized shape. I probably should have been frightened, or confused, but I was just filled with the knowledge that I had to get us out of there and like this I could.

I picked a direction at random, running wherever the trees were thinnest, and Tristan followed me obediently, silent save for his slow and steady breathing. We were making a hell of a lot of noise, but I only had to think of it and I could feel the threads of magic I needed under my fingers and with no effort at all they wove themselves _just so_ and the noises stopped. It was different from the unnoticeable spell, light and effortless where the other had been heavy and impossible to hold. Somehow, I knew that if anyone caught up with us, the gauzy spellwork draped around us would shred to pieces and we’d be caught.

The farther we went, the faster I pushed myself and Tristan, until we were all but running through the forest, and as time passed, my body grew colder and colder, but stronger with each passing step. I could tell Ross was still conscious, though I couldn’t hear him, but I felt him jerk in pain when I jostled him too hard, and his blood trickled down my back and made my shirt stick to my skin unpleasantly, strangely hot to my icy skin.

I knew it was the middle of the night, but it was steadily getting lighter all around us, though I knew it was much too soon to be a sign of dawn. Another thing I should have felt alarmed about.

The sounds of the Durands following us faded and faded and eventually disappeared as we ran and then a good long while after that I realized I had no idea where the hell we were. The hooks from the panic-inducing wards from the Durand territory had long faded from notice, so we were well away from their land, but I had no clue how close we were from the secondary meetup point with Amahle, or if I’d even taken us in the right direction for that. I didn’t feel panicked or worried about being so comprehensively lost, just stopped running and set Ross down against a tree trunk. Tristan stopped a few steps behind me, eyes still glowing silver, breathing laboured though his expression slack.

Ross blinked up at me dazedly for a long moment before he seemed to collect himself and asked, “Aster? Where are we?”

I shrugged, still not feeling the appropriate amount of concern about being the only relatively abled body between the three of us while in the middle of uninhabited woods with dangerous mobsters on our heels.

Ross closed his eyes and hissed out a slow, careful breath and then opened them again, his face hardening into a familiar look of determination. “Here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to stop my bleeding, I’m going to activated a seeking spell I have set for Amahle and you’re going to carry me as fast as you can wherever it leads you, since it’s like the magical equivalent of setting a firework off under a bear’s nose, so the Durand Family will notice it immediately.” He paused, a look of confusion passing across his face. “How did you manage to carry me? How did you get Tristan to walk on his own? How did the Durands after us not hear us running?”

Tristan remained silent, and I just shrugged again, since I didn’t know and his questions seemed distant and unimportant to me. Really the whole world around me felt that way, fragile and not like I was a part of it at all, like I was standing in a glass model of the forest rather than the real thing.

Ross squinted at me more closely and then said several very bad words, some of which I didn’t even understand.

“You’re burning yourself out again, you motherfucker, how did you manage that when you don’t even remember how to use high magic? Only you, you colossal dick.” He sighed deeply, tipping his head back against the tree. “Well that’ll have to be tomorrow’s problem. Help me get my shirt off, and I’ll talk you through helping me bandage the worst of this.”

Between the two of us we managed to peel his filthy shirt up to his armpits before we realized he couldn’t raise his arms over his head because of his wounds, and he had to give me a knife to cut it off. The worst wound was the oozing burn on his back from the dragon’s eye, a comet shaped slash from the meat of his shoulder that trailed down to nothing around his ribs on the opposite side. Distantly, I thought I ought to have been more horrified by the burnt flesh and the tacky blood smeared all over his torso, but I felt nothing.

“Alright,” he said turning to face me. “So-”

My eyes fell on the front of his torso and I noticed several things.

One, he had two faint scars under his pectoral muscles.

Two, there was a Durand Family tattoo on his uninjured shoulder.

“What the fuck is that?” I demanded. I didn’t feel distant now. Around me the world flickered crazily, like someone was screwing around with the world’s light switch. Sparks of hot-cold pain danced across my fingertips and shot through my lungs.

Ross glanced down, looking confused and irritated, and then back up, blinking in realization.

“Oh shit I forgot-”

“Was this your plan all along?” I demanded. I scrambled to my feet, feeling grounded and dizzy as I scrambled back. I bumped into Tristan but shoved him back, keeping myself between him and Ross. “Lure me right into the Durand Family’s territory?”

“Oh,” Ross said, sounding faintly startled. “Right. That’s the one you’d be worried about.”

“What the fuck else would I be worried about? What was this? A sick cat-and-mouse game for you?”

“Aster,” Ross said, voice carefully level. He held his hands out in a placating gesture, and stayed on the ground, not moving to get up. “Why would the Durand Family try to kill me if I was on their side?”

“I don’t know! Apparently they’re full of crazy people trying to kill me! Why do they do any of this if it isn’t for shits and giggles?” I shouted back, though I could feel a little seed of doubt being planted in my mind.

“I went to the effort to lure you into a Durand safe house without anyone noticing and then spent even more energy trying to get you out safely? Along with their prisoner? Just think about it, Aster. It doesn’t make sense. That thug back there called me a traitor, remember? There’s a reason for that. I swear to every deity in existence I’ll explain everything, but not here and not now. Now we need to work together to get ourselves out of here safely, right now,” Ross said. His voice was low and soothing and he met my gaze steadily, despite how being so much lower put him at an awkward angle that had to be hurting his injured back.

I hesitated. What he was saying made sense but-

“If you won’t do it to get me or you out of here safely, at least do it for Tristan,” Ross added gently.

Glancing over at Tristan I saw him swaying on his feet like a drunk, the glowing almost faded completely from his eyes. His face was sweaty and flushed, and it was obvious he hadn’t been fed well while in captivity, given his sunken cheeks.

“He can’t take what you’ve done to him much longer, but if it fades completely he’ll die out here. He needs to get to Amahle now,” Ross continued.

I stared at Tristan a beat longer, then stepped back towards Ross and sat down. I wasn’t about to let that man, who’d counted on us to save him, die because I was scared. Either Ross was going to kill me or he wasn’t. I was stronger than he was at the moment, so I had a chance at survival in the worst case scenario.

“What do I need to do?” I asked, as the power I’d had before flowed back over my skin like silk.

With Ross’s coaching, I turned both of our shirts into bandages and wrapped the worst of Ross’s injuries. It wasn’t much, and I smeared quite a bit of blood all over both of us, but it was better than nothing, according to Ross.

“How do you feel?” He asked as I prepared to put him back on my shoulders.

“Strange,” I said, even my own voice starting to sound distant to me, like it was being spoken on the other side of a piece of glass. My skin felt too tight for my body, and too cold, though I was beyond feeling any discomfort of any kind.

“I’ll bet,” Ross sighed and then climbed onto my back, in a piggyback rather than in a fireman’s carry like he’d been before.

“Just follow the light,” Ross said, and then crushed a sachet of herbs in his hand and let it drop. It turned to powder as it fell and the wind picked it up, or maybe it just floated up, dancing like sparks from a fire, and arranging themselves in a faint string that disappeared between the trees.

“Be careful, the spell shows the shortest path to wherever Amahle is,” Ross added as we set out. “Not the safest one.”

This became abundantly clear when the spell lead me to several fallen trees I had to walk around, as well as a narrow gulley too steep and covered in slippery stones for me to cross while carrying Ross. I barely noticed the tree branches that caught at my bare skin, or even Tristan silently swaying after me. After a while I barely even noticed Ross on my back, or the obstacles in my path. All I could remember was the tiny trail of glowing embers. Time had no meaning. Space had no meaning. It was just the faint thread that existed for me, and the power threatening to burst out of my skin.

“-okay, you can stop now,” a voice said to me. I had the feeling that the voice had been talking to me for a while now. It was a familiar one. Amahle. I blinked slowly, and the world around me faded from white to gray to having colour again. There were fewer trees. We were in an open space. A dirt road. A car was on the side of it, one door open and spilling yellow light out into the open.

“That’s it,” Amahle soothed. Her hands were tugging me downward and after I remembered how, I knelt down like she was asking me to. “It’s alright, you can let go of Ross now. There you go. Now, help me get both of these guys in the car, and then you can let the spell go, okay?”

Words felt foreign to me, verbal communication seemed so unwieldy and imprecise for a being made of starlight and ice like me, but I understood what she was asking, so I set Ross down and got him into the passenger seat of Amahle’s car.

The world was coming back to me, sharp and almost painfully warm to my frozen skin. Tristan was easier, I just had to push him, and he moved like a marionette, and obediently got into the backseat, even doing up the seatbelt on his own.

“Okay, now let go of the spell now. You’ve done enough, you don’t need to be strong anymore, Aster,” Amahle said. Her hands were gentle and warm on my arms, her dark eyes calm and warm.

“I don’t know how,” I said slowly. My body began to shake without my permission, and it scared me, until I realized I was just shivering.

“That’s alright. Just let go, do you feel the threads you’ve pulled out of yourself? They’re wrapped around your body, but just let them go and spool back up in your center where they belong. You can do it, just let go nice and gentle,” Amahle said. Somehow, I was seated on the open seat in the back of her car, facing out of the door, Amahle crouched next to my knees.

It was like she said, threads wrapped around my body, like a cocoon, or armour. I _pulled_ on one and it retracted almost painfully hard into my chest. Then another, and another, until I was gasping from it, pressing my face into Amahle’s braids, eyes tearing up from the sensation, not quite pain but nothing pleasant either.

“There you go,” Amahle said when all the threads were undone.  Gently she pushed me back into my seat, scooped my legs into the car and did up my seatbelt for me.

“Oh _fuck_ ,” I said, my head flopping backwards onto the seat. I felt _awful_. My shoulders and back were a singular agony, but worse was the painfully over sensitive feeling in every inch of my skin. The ambient magic in the car was enough to make me cry, the symbols on my neck, feet and wrists like brands of fire, and the rock in my pocket was like a hunk of burning lava in comparison. Weakly, I dug it out and dropped it on the floor, touching it as little as possible, and sighed in relief when it clattered to the floor and rolled out of sight.

“To say that you overdid it would be the biggest understatement of the century,” Amahle said, sounding less gentle and patient as she had before, and more irritated and exhausted. “Get some sleep if you can, I’ll need your help getting these bozos into the house.”

It should have been impossible, even without the burning rock in my pocket, I was in agony from head to toe, but in a matter of seconds I was out like a light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was my last buffer chapter, so this will be the last scheduled Thursday update due to real life stuff, but please do review and let me know what you think while I work on chapter 11!


	11. Chapter 11

I woke up in the floor feeling like I’d been run over by a bus and wished it had just put me out of my misery. Everything hurt. Even my _hair_ hurt, which I was pretty sure shouldn’t be possible, and _yet_.

We’d arrived at Amahle’s at some godforsaken hour of the night and somehow between the two of us we had managed to haul Ross into Amahle’s bed and Tristan into mine. I didn’t remember much after that, but apparently one of us had had the wherewithal to cobble together a makeshift bed on the floor of the spare room for me, given that was where I’d woken up. I had no idea where Amahle had slept, but I hoped she hadn’t woken up yet: she had mumbled something about having nightshift today, and she’d been through hell like the rest of us the day before.

I would have dearly loved to have gone back to sleep and avoid dealing with my aching body a little longer, but I seriously needed a glass of water, it felt like something had died in my mouth and then sand had been poured in after it to provide a lackluster burial. 

Reluctantly, I cracked one eye open and then slammed it back shut when the room proved to be blindingly bright.

After a moment, I dared to try again, albeit slowly. The room was still bright, but bearable. I spent several long minutes, just lying still, trying to pull myself together. Slowly, all the pain resolved itself into specific aches, which was somewhat more bearable. I had a roaring headache pounding behind my eyes. My upper back, shoulders and thighs felt, shockingly enough, like I’d raced through miles of uncharted wilderness with an adult male slung across my shoulders. That was the most painful, but the most irritating was my skin. It felt like I’d somehow gotten rings of rug burn in thin rings all over my body. I carefully lifted up one arm to inspect it closer, and was surprised to see that yes- my skin did look faintly burned, the skin pink and hot to the touch with gaps of healthy skin in between each ring. I carefully, painfully slow, sat up and pushed my filthy shirt up to look at my torso. The bandages I still had from the encounter with Nguyen were absolutely filthy, but more interestingly, the same pattern of bands of irritated skin was on my abdomen, though less painful than my arms.

I was still thirsty as hell so I begrudgingly I crawled to my feet and wobbled to the kitchen as silently as I could. I didn’t feel as awful as I had after my tangle with Nguyen, but I was still grateful to go back to bed when I was all done.

When I returned, I tried to be quiet, slowly easing the door shut so it didn’t squeak, but I caught my foot on a stray pillow and flailed uncoordinatedly as I tripped and fell onto my makeshift bed with a yelp.

“Whassat?” Tristan slurred from the bed, head popping out of his blanket cocoon, eyes mostly shut. “Aster?”

I was confused for a moment until I remembered that _oh yeah, that means me_.

“I’m okay, just clumsy,” I said and rolled into a more comfortable position.

He blinked at me slowly, and then said, “I’m sure you have a lot of questions...” He sat up slowly, shuffling back so he could lean against the wall behind the bed. His eyes were still fever bright, his skin flushed unhealthily, but he looked more lucid and less like an animated corpse, so it was an improvement.

“You should get some more sleep,” I said, despite every instinct saying _YES PLEASE._

Tristan shook his head. “Nightmares,” he said simply. “I’ll sleep later; when Amahle gets up. She’ll give me something, knocks you right out without dreaming.” He patted the bed next to him. “Climb up, I’m sure Ross was completely terrible at explaining anything. Feelings give him hives or something.”

I snickered without meaning to. That certainly described Ross to a T. I gave it about two seconds of thought, then crawled up next to Tristan, muscles screaming a protest at even this much activity.

Once I was settled, Tristan angled his body towards me, eyes downcast. “Look, I know you don’t know me, I’m- I’m a complete stranger to you,” he said, voice soft, lips twisted into a sardonic smile so sad it was hard to look at. “And you aren’t exactly the same person I knew,” he continued, “but... But could I-?” Tristan raised his arms up demonstratively, eyes still level with my knees, looking terribly embarrassed. 

The guy had been held captive, possibly- probably tortured for information and living with the assumption that Aster- that I was dead. And all he wanted was a hug.

I would have had to have been a complete monster to say no.

I wrapped my arms around his shoulders, feeling a little awkward. He made a sort of startled gasp, and hugged back hard enough to squeeze the breath out of me, his over hot face pressed against my neck. He breathed out, long and ragged, and I felt something wet against my skin- tears.

“I’m so sorry,” he said into my neck, voice barely above a croak. “This is all my fault.”

“What is?” I asked, baffled. I patted him on the back gingerly. I wasn’t exactly an expert in platonic friendly gestures, as I had no memories of ever hugging anyone. Somehow, I got the impression I was doing it wrong.

“The Durands catching up to you. You losing your memories,” he said, still clinging onto me. He breathed out harshly, almost a sob. “It’s my fault. I was stupid, the Durands caught me and I couldn’t keep them out of my head like you taught me. The just dug whatever they wanted out of my head. That’s how they knew where you were. I was the one who insisted we meet up. If I hadn’t known where you were, they wouldn’t have found you. You would have been safe. I’m so sorry, Aster.”

“Hey, it’s okay. Calm down, I’m not mad at you,” I said quickly. It was the truth. How could I be angry at a stranger for something I didn’t even remember? “I’m sure if I had my memories, I still wouldn’t blame you. I’d probably tell you you’re being stupid, right?” That got me a muffled snicker and a small nod. Tristan pulled away, scrubbing at his face, looking horrifically embarrassed.

“It was my idea, years ago, when we were still travelling together,” Tristan explained before I could ask him anything. “I suggested you have a way of removing your memories from your mind if you were about to being captured, so they couldn’t get anything out of you.” He rubbed his both his hands over his face and sighed deeply. “It was only supposed to be a last resort, and only for specific things you didn’t want the Durands or Mria Yansi to get their hands on- like Ross’s location, anything about Amahle, or where the safe houses are. You never had the chance to finish creating the spell, but I have to guess that you used an incomplete version.”

I frowned, rubbing my fingers over knees, smoothing out my worn sweatpants. “Well, it was my choice. I must have known the consequences, right?” I said slowly.

“Yeah. You always were a stubborn bastard,” Tristan said, his voice a strange mix of wistful and irritated.

Just then, the door burst open. Amahle stood in the doorway, looking equal parts exhausted and furious. There were heavy bags under her eyes, she was still wearing the same clothing as the day before. Everything about her just screamed ‘worn to the bone’.

“What the hell are either of you doing out of bed. You both need to rest. You, bed,” she said sharply, stabbing a finger at me. “And you, lay down before I _make_ you.” She stabbed her finger at Tristan.

“I swear to god if I don’t get some goddamn explanations for why people are trying to kill me and everyone around me I am going to do something regrettable,” I couldn’t help but whine. It was selfish- anyone with eyes could tell Tristan needed to rest. But I was so sick of being chased around without knowing _why_. 

“Bed!” Amahle snapped, voice rising.

“Amahle, have _you_ even slept?” Tristan asked pointedly.

Amahle pressed her lips together tightly, a clear no. “Ross took a very, very long time to stabilize. Bastard always likes to make things challenging.”

“Right. So, you give me one of those sleep drink things, I’ll talk to Aster for a bit and then drink that when we’re finished. But right now, you get _your_ ass in bed and get some rest before you fall over,” Tristan said firmly, raising his chin up challengingly when it looked like Amahle would protest.

She frowned at him but sighed like a quickly deflating tire, her shoulders sagging heavily. “Fine. But no doing anything too strenuous. Or getting out of bed. Your _own_ beds.”

Tristan rolled his eyes. “Amahle, do you really think that’s likely as things are?” he asked, one eyebrow nearly disappearing up into his bangs.

“Er,” I said a little awkwardly.

“That isn’t- I wasn’t- Oh for heaven’s sake, Tristan,” Amahle said helplessly and left the room like she would have been stomping if she wasn’t so exhausted.

Amahle returned minutes later holding two mason jars filled with questionable looking liquid and set them both on the floor where they wouldn’t be accidentally knocked over.

“Drink all of it when you’re ready to sleep,” Amahle instructed. “And don’t try walking or anything afterwards, it takes a few minutes to kick in fully but your motor functions will be shot to hell right away and the last thing I need is to have to haul either of your sorry asses into a bed _again_.”

“Yes, mom,” Tristan said snidely, and ducked the mock swipe Amahle swung at him as she left the room.

“Okay,” he said, turning back to me. “What do you want to know?”

Obligingly, my mind went blank.

“I don’t know- I just- everything? What the hell is Mria Yansi really? Why are people trying to kill me? Who even am? Who are you? How did we meet? Amahle said something about you being sent to Mria Yansi as a sort of exchange but left out why you had to go on the run with me. Why is the magic mob or whatever the Durand Family trying to _also_ kill me? What’s Ross’s deal? He kind of forgot to tell me he also _used to be one of those thugs_ , by the way,” I said, voice getting a bit high and hysterical before I could tamp down on that.

“Oh hellfire, Ross” Tristan muttered, and then said something in another language I didn’t understand, but sounded rather disgruntled. “Okay, why don’t I start at the beginning.”

~

“Mria Yansi is a city as incredibly insular as it is proficient in magic, which is to say extremely. It’s not entirely independent as it borders the lands of a very powerful fae lord, so generations back the Rex came to an agreement with the Durand Family. Mria Yansi would provide them with information and knowledge on how to use magic, things no other group of people knew how to do, along with pre-woven spells for more complicated uses. In return, the Durand Family would protect the city and smuggle in anything that couldn’t be made inside the walls of the city.

“For anyone living inside the walls magic is in everything, is everything, though less than a quarter of the population are mages. It’s in the clothing, how hair is kept, traditions and rituals that everyone goes through regardless of their capacity for magic. This is because in Mria Yansi everyone born there can see magic, even if they can’t manipulate it like a mage.

“It’s a specific spell that anyone can use, mages and non-mages and everyone learned to do it as kids. You trigger a sort of ‘switch’ within themselves that allowed anyone to see the strings and tapestries of magic in the natural world. That’s Mria Yansi’s greatest secret and greatest strength. Remember that, it’ll be important later.

“You were raised a mage by your parents, and according to you, were fairly average when it came to magic. Somehow you caught the attention of the Rex, the elected leader of the city. She saw something in you, and made you one of her apprentices, to learn the trade of the spells that run throughout the city, controlling the electricity, the water, and most importantly, the spells protecting the city.

“See, Mria Yansi was independent for a really long time before the partnership with the Durand Family, not to mention the fact that they didn’t trust them entirely. So they had created spells when the city was built that are carved into the very stone foundations of the city that make it impossible to see, much less find, unless the Rex wants you to find it, or you’re a native resident. It’s an enormously complex spell, more than any one person or even any hundred people could power on their own without it killing them.

“And that’s where I come in.”

~

_ “And who exactly are you?” The mage asked him, staring down his nose at him. It was easy to do given how tall he was, made even taller looking by his incredibly long blond hair looped into impossibly complex braids that made Tristan dizzy just looking at them. He wore long, trailing robes with intricate patterns woven into every inch in dark blue and gray. It made Tristan feel a little foolish to be standing there in his beat-up sneakers and jeans and a t-shirt, though he’d never been on to give a single shit about how he looked until that very moment. _

_ “Ah- I’m Tristan?” he said, internally wincing at how it sounded like a question. “I’m supposed to be your, er, student? I’m from the Durand Family. Someone figured I had high potential to learn magic, so they sent me here and the Wreck said you’re going to teach me. _

_ “Rex,” the mage corrected, almost absently as he continued to scrutinize Tristan from head to toe. “Alright,” he said. “I doubt you’ll be able to learn much, but if I’m supposed to teach you, I’ll do my best to drill it into your thick skull, so you won’t be entirely hopeless.” _

_ “Gee, thanks,” Tristan said, the sarcasm seeming to go entirely over the other guy’s head. _

_ The mage turned back to whatever he was doing- seemingly staring off into space, though Tristan noticed his eyes changed from blue to green as he frowned at nothing. Tristan was starting to feel like this whole idea had been a poor decision, though it wasn’t one he’d had much choice in. _

_ “What’s your name?” Tristan asked when the mage didn’t say or do anything more. _

_ That earned him a small hiss and one hand flapped at him in clear irritation. _

_ Tristan rolled his eyes and sat down on the floor to wait for the guy to finish... whatever he was doing. The room was entirely bare and looked like it belonged in a medieval castle, not the perfectly modern looking house Tristan had been sent to. There was no furniture, just stone walls and floor and a wooden roof, with a single window providing light at one end and a wooden door at the other. _

_ Time passed, at least half an hour Tristan guessed, before the Mage turned back to him, eyes back to an ordinary shade of blue rather than the off-putting acid green. _

_ “My name is Aster Veifan. I am Rex Regina’s sixth apprentice,” the mage said. Tristan looked at him a bit closer and reevaluated his estimation of the guy’s age. He was definitely younger than Tristan was, nineteen at most, likely younger. Great, so he was going to be learning magic and shit from an up-his-own ass teenager. Tristan was going to kill someone for this, even if he couldn’t even shout at those responsible without being shot. _

_ “Cool,” Tristan said, for lack of better response. “So, what were you doing before, trying to stare though the wall with your x-ray vision?” _

_ “My- what?” The guy seemed completely baffled. Tristan didn’t hold back another eyeroll. “I was binding off the ends of a spell, it was rather delicate and would have unraveled if I hadn’t finished it right away...” He frowned at Tristan, sweeping from head to toe once again. “You couldn’t see it?” _

_ “See what? You were just staring off into empty space,” Tristan said slowly. He was starting to get the impression that this kid was a bit off his rocker. _

_ “You don’t have the Sight,” Aster sighed deeply, like Tristan had already failed some unknown test. “That will make this more difficult than it already is.” _

_ “Oh, I’m sorry,” Tristan snapped, temper flaring. “What exactly am I supposed to be able to see? There’s nothing there!” _

_ Instead of snapping back or even frowning at him, Aster merely motioned him forward. _

_ “Come here, I’ll show you. In time you, hopefully, should be able to do this on your own, but I’ll assist you the first time,” he said. _

_ “See what?” Tristan asked and got to his feet, stepping forward cautiously. Aster gripped him by the shoulders and steered to stand on the exact spot Aster had been on before while staring off into space. _

_ “The magic,” Aster replied and clapped his hands over Tristan’s temples firmly. _

_ Before Tristan could ask him what the hell he was doing, there was a sound- no a feeling- and abruptly the room was much brighter. It was so bright it was nearly impossible for him to see anything aside from the light. Eventually his eyes adjusted, and Tristan let out a startled gasp. _

_ There were strings of light  _ everywhere _. Dark brown, black, grey and copper were woven in sturdy, orderly grids in the floor and all of the walls, or maybe they were just above them, it was hard to tell. From the window came pale, nearly iridescent strings in more round, curlicuing, twisting patterns that moved like they were alive before Tristan’s very eyes._

_ He looked down at his hands and nearly jumped a foot in the air to see loops of golden light loosely wrapped around his whole body, and they moved and flexed with every motion, never drawing tight or even touching his skin. _

_ “It’s the spell I’m using to allow you to see the magic,” Aster said from behind him. “They’ll disappear once I remove the spell, though you obviously wouldn’t be able to tell.” _

_ “What is all of this?” Tristan asked, gesturing to the whole room. “Has it always been there?” _

_ “It is the world,” Aster replied. “Yes, it’s always been like this, though only mages born here, and perhaps some of the fey, are able to see the world as it is.” He turned Tristan’s head towards the window, never removing his hands from his temples. “Natural magic is somewhat chaotic, like the air you see through the window. Spells we weave are more structured, since man doesn’t have a capacity for complete chaos. We always end up creating some form of pattern, some more obvious than others.” He pointed Tristan’s head at the earthy grid covering the walls. _

_ “So what were you making before?” Tristan asked. “The stuff on the walls?” _

_ “No, those are wards, to prevent anything I create in here from leaving this room unintentionally, to prevent accidents. They are always in place. The spell I was working on was here.” Aster gently turned Tristan to face the middle of the empty room. _

_ Only it wasn’t so empty after all. _

_ The center of the room was a riot of colours. A sort of net, or loosely woven cloth made of light took up the entire space. It was all different shades of blue, from the darkest navy only a step above black, to a blue so pale Tristan could almost see through it. It was much more complex than the wards on the walls, though if he looked closely he could see a sort of pattern- a curve here, a crisscrossing braid there. _

_ “You made this?” Tristan asked incredulously. It was amazingly detailed, he couldn’t imagine a single person being able to weave such a thing without it being a lifelong effort. _

_ “Hardly. I was merely changing it slightly. Do you see where the silver is? That was what I was adding.” _

_ Tristan squinted at the beautiful tapestry before him and was surprised to find little hints of sterling silver woven throughout the entire thing, just little hints here and there, a single thread of silver in the enormous blue cloud. _

_ “That’s amazing! What does it do?” Tristan asked, enthralled. _

_ “Oh. Thank you,” Aster said, sounding surprised. The words sounded a little awkward, like he didn’t often say them. “The original spell is to keep perishable cold, but it requires a significant amount of energy, since it’s rather inefficient and cools the entire area around the food. The changes I made should allow to only cool the food, and conserve energy.” _

_ Tristan raised an eyebrow. “So it’s just a refrigerator spell? But it’s so pretty!” _

_ “A what?” Aster asked, and removed his hands from Tristan’s head. Immediately the world became dramatically darker, and Tristan was left blinking spots out of his vision for several minutes. _

_ “A refrigerator. You know, giant metal box that keeps things cold?” he replied, rubbing at his eyes. “And warn a guy next time you do that, I feel like I’ve gone blind.” _

_ “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Aster said with a frown and then added, “My apologies. That spell is not wise to keep on another person like that for long periods of time. You will need to learn to do it on your own quickly so we may progress with your learning.” _

_ “You guys don’t have refrigerators here? That’s crazy. Though I guess it makes sense if you’ve got stuff like that,” Tristan said, flapping a hand at the now seemingly empty center of the room. “So do you always see the world like that? It’s beautiful, but seems like it could get distracting” _

_ Aster shook his head. “No, only when we trigger the Sight spell. Like so,” he said and squinted slightly and his eyes became brilliant green once more. “It is a simple spell all citizens, even non-mages, can perform, though it can become tiring if used for several hours at a time.” His eyes went back to their normal blue. “It will be the first spell you learn to create.” _

_ “Right. Magic eye powers. Should be a breeze.” _

_ ~ _

“It really wasn’t. It took me months to even manage to do it wrong, much less get it right. You weren’t the most patient teacher, but you were dedicated and had ample time since the Rex was busy teaching her more advanced apprentices and running the city.

“You were also working on a special project, since I spent so much of my time just trying to see magic. Apprenticeships are six years long, and end when the apprentice is twenty-one. You still had several years left to go, but apprentices were expected to create something to show their master-mage at the halfway point to show what they’ve learned so far. You had chosen to replicate and modify one of the most integral spells in the city- the barrier spell.

“While I was failing to learn the most basic spell, you showed me the city and explained the fundamentals of magic. I saw and learned things no outsider had ever had access to before, which was half the point of the Durand Family sending me.

“Obviously they had their own motives, aside from gaining a more useful thug. See, the Durand Family had always wanted to have their own city, much like Mria Yansi. But having all of your assets in one place is just asking for trouble, especially with how many enemies the Family had made since its inception. So the Durand Family had been making do with all of their strongholds in every major city. But if they knew how to hide a city like Mria Yansi could... Well, I bet you see where this is going.”

~

_ “It’s... a well,” Tristan said. It was pretty anticlimactic, after all the buildup on going to see ‘the most important location in the entire city’. It was a perfectly ordinary well, made of plain grey slate, maybe a foot high, housed in an enormous building that was frankly a lot more interesting, given the elaborate mosaics covering every surface. _

_ “It’s the Spirit Fountain. It is the source of much of our magic,” Aster said haughtily. _

_ Tristan snorted and peered down into the well. _

_ “It’s also empty,” he said, raising his eyebrows at Aster. _

_ “It’s not a fountain of  _ water _,” Aster said, like this should be obvious._

_ “It’s not a fountain at all, it’s a well,” Tristan replied, holding back a smirk as Aster’s face started to grow pink with irritation. Riling him up was one of Tristan’s favourite pastimes now that he was stuck in a city without cell service much less internet or any hint of pop culture. _

_ “There is a fountain below, a natural spring of magic. The well and the well-house was built over top of it to prevent anything from disturbing it. The well is only really used for ritual purposes,” Aster explained. “It’s the closest thing we have to religion- all spells are connected in some way to the Fountainhead, as are all citizens in Mria Yansi.” _

_ “Seriously?” Tristan asked, looking at the well with a bit more interest. There was a hell of a lot of spells in the city, since there was no electricity or modern equipment. Spells were used for absolutely everything. “Why?” _

_ “I’ve explained to you where magic comes from,” Aster replied. _

_ Hearing the hidden prompt to explain it himself, Tristan sighed and dutifully said, “From the world around us, or from within us.” _

_ “Exactly, so raw magic comes from the well and is absorbed into the world, and into ourselves in a continuous process, creating a link.” _

_ “So every single spell would fail if this thing quit working one day?” Tristan asked dubiously. It was hard to believe something so unassuming was so powerful. _

_ “Not exactly. Think of it as a giant battery, it just adds power to everything around it. Without it spells would still function, but it would be more difficult and take a great deal of time since there would be fewer threads to weave together. And there is one spell that would be unaffected, more or less.” _

_ “What’s that?” _

_ “The barrier spell. As far as I can tell it was designed to withstand literally any impossible event. But I shouldn’t be talking about that, I’m privileged to be able to study it, but you and everyone else in the city isn’t.” _

_ “Secret magic spell, don’t talk about it, got it,” Tristan said with a grin. _

_ “This is serious! I could get into serious trouble for even mentioning it to you!” Aster snapped, eyes sparking. He was kind of adorable when he wanted to kill someone, Tristan couldn’t help but think. _

_ “Okay, okay! I’ll take it seriously,” Tristan said, not really taking it seriously at all. What would he get arrested by the magic cops or something, just for knowing a spell existed? He still couldn’t even  _ see _magic._

~

“I should have taken it much more seriously. Though I’m not sure how much that would have helped, given that you already took it exceptionally seriously and were still nearly killed over it.

“Only a few weeks later, I finally got the Sight spell to work. At the same time, you noticed something strange going on in the city.

“Someone was following you.”

~

_ “Aster!” Tristan shouted, bursting into the workroom. The wooden door swung in with such force it bounced off of the stone wall inside and would have slammed back shut if Tristan hadn’t hastily stuck one booted foot into the door jam. _

_ “I got the Sight spell! It’s amazing! Everything is so beautiful! I looked at the well and it was- just amazing! Had to let go of the spell after that, just looking at the well gave me a killer headache, but- what’s wrong?” Tristan’s good mood faded at the response, or lack of response he’d gotten from his teacher. _

_ Aster had moved a sturdy desk into the room and had placed it next the only window, and had reams of papers spread across it. He was perched on a stool and had turned when Tristan had made his entrance, but his expression was deeply troubled, one hand tugging at a stray braid, as was his habit when he was nervous. _

_ He pressed his lips together tightly before sighing and motioning Tristan closer, eyes darting around the room, like he expected to find a third person hiding in the barren room. _

_ Frowning, Tristan walked across the room. “What’s up?” He asked lowly. _

_ Aster grabbed him by the arm and tugged him down so he could whisper directly in his ear, voice just barely above a whisper, “Someone’s been following me.” _

_ Tristan nearly jerked away in shock, but just raised an eyebrow and whispered back, “Are you sure you haven’t been working too hard? Why would anyone follow you?” _

_ “I’m uncertain. But this isn’t the first time. I’ve noticed for weeks, and today I tried to test it. There’s a little alcove between two of the houses four blocks from here, one of the houses added a new addition a few years ago. Just looking, you wouldn’t know it was there unless you knew already, so I quickly ducked in there when coming here. The person I thought was following me stopped when they got to where it looked like I disappeared and paced back and forth for nearly twenty minutes, like they were looking for me. It was no passerby, they were following me.” _

_ “Did you get a good look at them?” He asked, accepting this with little fanfare. He was a lower ranked member of an international crime syndicate, while he had been initially skeptical, this sort of thing didn’t sound impossible to him. _

_ Aster shook his head, looking troubled. “No, there was no way to look out of my hiding place without being seen.” _

_ Tristan considered this, then sighed. “Well I guess there’s nothing to be done, not without letting them know that you know they’re following you. I mean, it’s not like you have anything to hide, right?” _

_ With a frown, Aster replied, “Only my work on the barrier spell. That is my only secret.” _

_ “Well, you only work on it here, right?” Tristan pointed out. “Whoever’s following you can’t sneak in here to look at it without you noticing, so it should be safe.” _

_ “I suppose...” Aster said, but sounded troubled. He turned on his stool to face the center of the room, where Tristan knew he’d find the replica of the barrier spell if he looked for it. “I do have other things to worry about right now...” _

_ “How’s it coming? You have to show it to the Rex next week, right?” Tristan asked. The last few weeks Aster had been teaching him less and less, as he grew more frantic in trying to complete his project on time to show it to his master to demonstrate how much he’d learned. _

_ “I’m not going to finish it in time,” Aster admitted, with a defeated sigh. “It seems like every time I think I’ve found the last layer of the spell, I find a new one, even more complicated than the last. Not only that, but as I go I’ve been having a much more difficult time differentiating the original spell from the other spells that have become tangled with it over time-” _

_ “What?” Tristan interrupted, knowing Aster could go on like this for several more minutes. That was why he’d asked, it always seemed like his teacher was able to focus and find solutions much faster after he’d listed off the numerous problems he was facing. _

_ “Ah, I haven’t told you about that yet. It’s not common with newer spells, or ones that are used directly, like a spell you turn on or off. Spells that are left on their own tend not to unravel, if they’re well-made they should be designed to be too sturdy for that. But they will become tangled with other spells over time if left alone for long enough,” Aster explained. “The city has mages whose duty is just to untangle spells that do this, but it seems like no one has done so for the barrier spell in decades at least.” _

_ Tristan frowned. “That seems pretty weird, if you ask me. I mean isn’t it like this whole place’s number one defense?” He asked, though he wasn’t particularly surprised. There were a ridiculous number of things that seemed obvious to him, but were completely backwards in Mria Yansi. It was a strange place. _

_ “It’s one of the most beautifully crafted spells I’ve ever seen,” Aster replied, eyes going green with the Sight. “Aside from this, it needs no attention even after a hundred years. Even the sturdiest spells created do require a small amount of attention every ten years or so. It seems like it was assumed that the barrier spell needs no maintenance. It doesn’t help that it’s nearly impossible to see unless you’re looking for it specifically. It’s buried under a hundred years of other spells set on the city, you have to pull each layer back to see it.” _

_ “Like tracing paper,” Tristan said, eyeing the pad of paper abandoned on the desk. On the top page, slightly smudged, was the basic outline of the main threads of the barrier spell. He’d seen Aster draw them out in ink, pencil, paint and even pastels so often he was certain he’d recognize it anywhere by that point. “You can’t see the bottom page until you’ve flipped the top pages back.” _

_ “Exactly,” Aster agreed, looking both startled and pleased. “I was too ambitious on this project,” He admitted more quietly. “I should have chosen a simpler project to recreated. Rex Regina is hardly going to be impressed with a half-finished spell.” _

_ “How long have you been working on this? Almost a year now, right?” Tristan said, gesturing at what, to him, still looked like empty air. “I’m sure she’ll be amazed! What have her other apprentices done?” _

_ Aster sighed deeply and rubbed a weary hand over his face. “Normally, an apprentice would invent a new spell. Two years ago, Rex Regina’s fifth apprentice created a spell that changes the colour of wool depending on the temperature. It was very well received,” Aster said, looking more defeated with each word. _

_ “Sounds pretty lame,” Tristan said bluntly. “How is that even useful? What you’re doing sounds way more important and difficult! Why’d you decide to do it instead of making something, though?” _

_ “I’m not talented when it comes to creating new spells,” Aster replied. “Everyone was rather confused when Rex Regina chose me to become her newest apprentice, myself included, as normally she only chooses the most talented mages-in-training...” He paused, and looked away briefly, looking almost embarrassed for a moment before he seemed to collect himself and looked back to Tristan. “I was hoping to prove myself by choosing to focus on something that I have talent with rather than struggling with creating a new spell. Obviously that was merely my ego talking and this will be the result of that.” _

_ Tristan rolled his eyes. He’d warmed up to Aster over time, the guy was less of an asshole once you got to know him, but his flair for the melodramatic was still always over the top no matter how you looked at it. _

_ “I’m sure this thing is incredible, even if you won’t have it finished. Here, let me take a look,” he said and activated his Sight despite the lingering headache from the last time he’d used it. _

_ The spell was... there were no words Tristan could think of to describe how beautiful it was. The tapestry was woven into every type of braid Tristan had ever seen woven into it, some so tiny they were nearly invisible to the eye. Other parts seemed almost knotted, in firm, sturdy shapes, while towards the center it almost looked like open lacework so thin and delicate it looked like it had been spun by a spider. It seemed like it contained every colour under the sun was captured in the elaborate, glittering tapestry before him, and yet it seemed like every part of it belonged together. Somehow the whole thing seemed so impossibly right it almost seemed like it couldn’t have been made by human hands, it had to have sprung from the earth itself. _

_ “Aster...” Tristan breathed, eyes roving over the spell from corner to corner, completely distracted from the headache pounding behind his eyes from using the Sight. “That’s amazing, how could you think anyone wouldn’t be amazed by that? You’re incredible!” _

_ “Ah,” Aster said, looking flustered. Most amazing was the faint blush that dusted his cheeks. “Thank you.” _

_ It wasn’t the first time Tristan had thought about kissing Aster, he was pretty cute even if he could be a real stick-in-the-mud sometimes. It was the first time, however, that he’d acted on that thought. _

_ They were nearly the same height, it was easy to just tug him down the scant half inch to reach his lips. Aster nearly jumped out of his skin, but Tristan’s light hold on his shoulders kept him in place, and he relaxed into the kiss a breath later. _

_ Then abruptly jerked away. _

_ “Don’t,” Aster snapped, shoulders hunched. His face was bright red, his face screwed up in a scowl. _

_ “Hey, what’s the problem?” Tristan asked, backing up a step. _

_ “Just don’t,” Aster snapped, and turned back to the barrier spell, eyes going green with the Sight. _

_ Tristan bit back four different things he knew would be poorly phrased and turned his own work. Aster didn’t owe him anything. Even if it seemed like… Tristan pushed that thought aside. _

_ Hours later, Tristan returned to his room alone, racked with guilt. _

_ He’d seen the spell he’d been sent to steal. _

_ He didn’t want to take it anymore. _

~

“Of course, the Rex was very impressed with what you’d done in a year. Even unfinished it was a real accomplishment. She was so pleased that she allowed you to have access to the journals of the mages who had originally created the barrier spell, information that very few mages had ever had access to.

“But with more information, the spell grew even more complicated. There was something at the heart of it that you just couldn’t understand. Something fundamental to understanding how it worked and to recreating it. Its power source.

“Eventually, you figured it out. But it wasn’t anything you’d expected. It changed how you saw your home permanently.”

~

_ “I think I have it figured out!” Aster exclaimed, eyes bright. _

_ Tristan froze in the doorway, half asleep because he’d only just arrived and it was at most 5:30 in the morning. Sometimes he hated himself for agreeing to live in a city full of medieval, backwards magic people. Especially when it involved rising before dawn. _

_ “Figured what out?” He asked, once his poor sleep-deprived brain parsed Aster’s words. _

_ “The missing piece of the barrier Spell! It’s so obvious, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before!” Aster said, pacing in excited circles in the empty room. His hair was a mess, braids half unraveled and buns nearly fallen out. _

_ “Have you slept?” Tristan asked. _

_ Aster waved this off as irrelevant, even as he began to explain. “I didn’t understand how such a complex spell could be independent of the spirit fountain. Some small spells can be self-contained and generate their own energy, but the barrier spell is much too complex and extensive for that. It couldn’t be tied to any one mage as it would drain them dry in a matter of seconds, and the spell was created long before anyone in the city was alive.” _

_ “But you’ve figured it out?” Tristan asked, only slightly lost. He mostly understood how spells worked, but he’d only just began to be able to see them, so it was still awfully abstract to him. _

_ “Yes. There’s some sort of power source it’s tied to. Perhaps some sort of magical item created by the fae or a secondary fountain or something. It’s located in the Council building,” Aster said, face lighting up in excitement. It made him look a good five years younger, given his serious expression usually aged him up considerably. _

_ If Tristan weren’t so tired, he probably would have kissed him. Instead he said, “So now what?” _

_ “We go to the council building, of course,” Aster said, like it was obvious. He brushed past Tristan to the door and picked up his outer robe, which had been discarded on the floor. _

_ “Uh- dude, Aster. It’s like not even dawn. The sun isn’t up yet. Are we, like.... Allowed to just barge in whenever?” Tristan said, trailing after him down the hall. _

_ Aster shrugged, like this was of little consequence. “It’s a public building. Besides, Rex Regina said I would be allowed any resources I need to complete my work.” _

_ Still, Tristan didn’t feel comforted and followed Aster on silent feet out of the building and into the street. Somehow, he knew this would end poorly. _

_ The city was almost entirely silent, most non-mage citizens still in their beds, like sensible human beings. The mages they encountered ranged from wide awake and alert to all but sleepwalking, but none of them stopped them, even as they entered the great stone council building in the center of the city. _

_ Inside the enormous foyer, Aster looked around several times, almost like a dog searching for a scent, and then set off down a hallway without hesitation. They made several turns, enough to make Tristan feel helplessly turned around, and then down a set of stairs. They emerged in a room that felt like it had been long abandoned, the air stale and the floor covered in dust. Aster didn’t even pause, heading down several more abandoned hallways and a second set of stairs. _

_ “Where even are we?” Tristan asked in a hushed voice. It felt like they were trespassing, wherever they were. _

_ “Mria Yansi used to be a lot more populated,” Aster explained. “We also had a royal family and a court. This was likely servant quarters or something. Nobody really talks about it,” he added when Tristan shot him a confused look. _

_ “Why not?” Tristan asked. A magic royal family sounded pretty darn interesting to him. _

_ “There was a civil war, hundreds of years ago. The entire royal family was killed, along with most of the court and many of the city’s strongest mages. No one alive today experienced it, or knew anyone who did, but it’s still considered the darkest stain on our history. The only reason this building is still used is because it was built with protection spells laid right into the foundations. It’s impossible to tear down.” _

_ “Yikes,” Tristan said, shivering. Somehow, knowing hundreds of people had been killed in that very building did not make him feel any more comfortable wandering around in its creepy basement. _

_ “We’re nearly there,” Aster said and rounded a corner, the carpeted floor changing to ancient stone. “Just beyond this door-” _

_ They pushed through the heavy wooden door and both froze on the spot. _

_ The hallway beyond was lined with cells. _

_ They had found the power source for the barrier spell. _

_ It was people. _


	12. Chapter 12

“I’m sorry, you need to run that by me again,” I said, a numb sort of horror building in my gut.

Tristan pursed his lips and said, voice carefully even, “The barrier spell, it was being powered by people, draining them of their energy to protect the city. None of them were from Mria Yansi either.”

“Are- are you saying, the Rex or whoever had been kidnapping people and forcing them to power some ancient spell?” I asked. I felt sick. There it was: surprise, you’re from a secret cult city that uses unwilling people to power some shitty spell.

“It gets worse,” Tristan said darkly. “The spell isn’t efficient, it’s very hard on the people being used as batteries. After a few years, it kills them since it drains more energy than the person can replace.”

“So more people are taken every year,” I concluded, wanting to throw up. How could anyone knowingly do such a thing? And not just that, but continue to do it, year after year. The Barrier spell had been around since the foundation of Mria Yansi. The sheer number of people that had to have died...

“Yes. And that’s how we met Ross,” Tristan explained. “Though he met us quite a while before we met him.”

~  
_Tristan and Aster stumbled out of the building and into the early morning sunshine, blinking and dazed, like prisoners being released from months long captivity. All around them people went about their mornings like nothing had changed and everything was normal. Because it was, for them._

_Tristan felt like he might be sick. Without hesitation, they both ducked around a corner into a narrow, deserted street and collapsed onto a bench._

_“That... How could anyone do this?” Aster asked, his voice cracking. He was near tears and trembling like a leaf. “How could they hide something like this from the Rex?”_

_Tristan hesitated, and then said gently, “I don’t think anyone could have. She has to know.”_

_Aster whirled on him, nearly hitting Tristan in the face with his braids, eyes blazing. “That’s not possible- she can’t- she wouldn’t-” He cut himself off, what little colour left in his face draining, and he collapsed backwards against the wall like he had nothing left in him. “She knows,” he agreed, voice shaking._

_The sat in silence for nearly half an hour, their minds reeling and trying to take in what they’d just witnessed. Tristan had seen a lot of things after becoming part of the Durand Family, the vast majority of them unpleasant, but this... there had been children in that cell. Pale, like they hadn’t seen sunlight in years, and sickly looking. The adults had stared at them dull eyed, and no one had even tried to call for help. It had been like all of them had known it was pointless._

_“What do we do now?” Tristan asked eventually. This wasn’t something he could unsee or forget about. He couldn’t pretend he was living in the same city that he had been earlier that morning. They had to do something._

_He turned to face Aster, and was startled to see his normally stoic companion silently crying._

_“How could she do something like this?” He asked, not even trying to stop the tears running down his cheeks._

_“People will do whatever it takes to protect their home,” Tristan said, unable to avoid thinking about home, about the blood-soaked streets of his birth place._

_“I can’t just leave them there, it isn’t right,” Aster said sharply, his voice strengthening. “I have to get them out of the city.”_

_“Even if we could do that, they’d just go find more people to take,” Tristan pointed out, mind already racing through the possibilities. If anything happened, he’d likely be implicated, given his status in Mria Yansi as a somewhat disdained outsider. They’d have to be careful, whatever they did, and would need to leave the city before they were found out._

_The Durand Family would not be pleased. Doing anything to the barrier spell would jeopardize their agreement with the Rex. He’d lose any semblance of a family he had, even if it was a blood soaked one. Likely, he’d never be able to speak to any of them ever again._

_But he couldn’t forget those pale faces and hopeless looks, like they were all already dead and just waiting for their bodies to catch up._

_Aster was silent for a long moment and then said, voice almost too soft to be heard, “Then I’ll have to ruin the spell too.”_

_Tristan stared at him, eyes nearly bulging out. “What.”_

_Aster sat up straighter, eyes trained forward, looking every inch the pompous jerk Tristan had met on his first day in the city and not like the disillusioned teenager he’d been seconds before. Only the drying tears on his face and the redness of his eyes gave him away._

_“I’ll destroy the spell, make it so no one can reactivate it,” he said calmly, like he was discussing the weather or explaining a simple spell. “No one else has studied it like I have, they wouldn’t be able to fix it if I pull it apart.”_

_“They’d know you were the one to do it,” Tristan pointed out, uncertain of if Aster realized the full gravity of what he was suggesting. There would be no going back or room for regrets._

_“I’d have to leave Mria Yansi,” Aster agreed, only the slightest quaver in his voice. He turned to Tristan, eyes still rimmed red, but focused and filled with resolve. “I couldn’t live here knowing it was only thanks to people dying to keep the city protected.” He paused and added, much softer, “Even if I wasn’t found out, I don’t think I could stay, knowing what’s been happening for centuries.” He bit his lip and then added, with an almost despairing laugh, “I’ll also have to tamper with the Spirit Fountain, since they could track me through it. Why not ruin that too, if I’m already destroying the most important and ancient spell in the city.”_

_Tristan sighed and rubbed a weary hand over his face. The sun had barely risen and he wished he were back in bed. His bed from the day before, when he’d been ignorant to it all. “This isn’t something we can just do next week, we’ll have to wait and plan quite a lot,” he cautioned. Aster had to know all the implications of what he was suggesting before he committed. It would be cruel otherwise._

_But Aster nodded regardless, heart heavy. “It will at least give me a chance to say good bye, I suppose,” he said, with a sardonic twist to his lips._

_Neither of them noticed the gentle scrape of a foot against the cobblestone road, or the soft exhale of breath as a shadow inched away, mind reeling with what he’d heard._

_~_

“We spent months planning,” Tristan said, smoothing his fingers over the wrinkled sheets, eyes distant, like he was looking directly into the past, rather than right at me. “You focused on figuring out how to destroy the spell in such a way it couldn’t be fixed, and making sure there was no information left behind for someone to try and figure out what you’d done.”

“The journals,” I said, remembering the blank pages I remembered Ross saying were actually filled with ancient high magic spells. “Did I already have them then?”

“You still have them?” Tristan asked, looking surprised. “How?”

“Found them while digging through my stuff trying to figure out who I was,” I explained, and then abruptly realized I had no idea what had happened to all of my belongings since I’d come to Amahle’s house. “Along with a bunch of other weird stuff.”

“Huh,” Tristan said, eyebrows raised. “I’d thought you would have lost or hidden them after we separated.”

“I still have them... somewhere, if you wanted to look at them,” I offered, a bit dubious about getting up or trying to find my bags without waking Ross or Amahle.

Thankfully, Tristan shook his head. “Maybe after I’ve slept,” he said. “Anyways, you did have access to the journals, but only while you were in the Rex’s office, you couldn’t take them with you. I planned out how to steal them in advance, while you tackled the destruction of the barrier spell.”

~

_The door to Aster’s workroom creaked open softly, almost too soft to be heard, but Aster and Tristan both jumped at the sound and scrambled to hide the notes they’d been making on their burgeoning plans._

_In the doorway stood a man they both knew couldn’t be from Mria Yansi- he was stocky with freckles and red hair, whereas everyone native to the city tended towards towering height and pale blond hair. More importantly, he was also pointing a gun at Aster._

_Tristan made an aborted motion to grab his own gun, but froze when he heard the safety of the man’s gun click off._

_“Don’t move an inch or I’ll shoot him,” the man said, voice icy. He was deadly serious, his face entirely uncompromising._

_“Who are you? How did you get in here?” Aster asked, unafraid and staring at the gun like he’d never seen one before- because he hadn’t, Tristan realized with a sudden spike of fear. He wasn’t scared because he didn’t know he was in danger. Mria Yansi had no need for guns with how many powerful mages were within its walls. Without thinking, Tristan grabbed Aster by the shoulder, holding him in place._

_“Be quiet,” the man snapped, then added to Tristan, “And hands where I can see them, Durand.”_

_“What do you want?” Tristan asked, holding up his free hand, not moving a muscle. The man’s eyes were cold and Tristan knew he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot._

_“What do you know about the barrier spell?” The man asked, eyes straying to where Aster’s notes on the spell were in still plain sight._

_“It’s terrible,” Aster said without hesitation._

_This seemed to calm the man, his eyes losing some of that killing intent._

_“Who are you?” Tristan asked again. Given the way the man was dressed, he had his suspicions, but it didn’t make much sense... Why would there be another Durand member in the city? And so clearly without permission, too. Tristan had known going into the city that he’d be alone and wouldn’t be able to get help if things went poorly. There was no reason for someone else from the family to be there._

_The man eyed him and then lowered the gun. “My name doesn’t matter. What does is that your city took my brother from me.” His voice was hard and filled with a carefully controlled rage. “I’m here to get him back, and make sure no one else is taken."_

_Aster frowned at him and then said, “You were the one following me.”_

_“Yes. I knew you were researching the barrier spell. I need to know how to destroy it and get my brother out of here.”_

_“Well, sounds like we have similar goals,” Tristan said, choosing his words carefully. “We could work together.”_

_The man sneered. “Like I’d trust a Durand, or a mage from this hellhole.”_

_“Funny talk coming from a man with a Durand tattoo on his arm,” Tristan said, finally spotting the familiar curling edge of a tattoo peeking out from under the man’s t-shirt sleeve as his arms flexed._

_“They were a means to an end,” the man said, voice curt, but he seemed to consider Tristan’s words more carefully and lowered the gun, though he didn’t holster it. “What is your plan?” He asked, his eyes deadly focused._

_“I’m going to pull apart the barrier spell to shreds and steal all of their spell books detailing how to create or repair the spell,” Aster said without hesitation. Tristan could see a hint of fear in his eyes, but his voice was firm and didn’t leave room for indecisiveness. “I’m the only one who’s studied it, so they won’t be able to fix it.” Aster paused, as if considering his words, and added, voice almost casual “And I’ll need to tamper with the Spirit Fountain. At approximately the same time, which will be the tricky part.”_

_“You mentioned that before- why do you need to do that? Wouldn’t just the barrier spell be enough?” Tristan asked. The well was one of the few things he hadn’t learned about. It was certainly mysterious. Aster had only ever spoken about it the one time he’d taken Tristan to see it. It hadn’t gone over his head how the people in the city, mages and non-mages alike, all treated the place like it was almost a shrine or a temple or the like, reverent and almost fearful in a way. It was what made Tristan wonder if Aster really could go through with their plan- Tristan was certain Aster would, and could, make good on the plan to thoroughly destroy the barrier spell, but spiritual shit like the well was an entirely different story, in Tristan’s experience._

_Aster visibly hesitated and then gave a little laugh that verged on the hysterical. “Well if I’m already plotting on destroying one of our most integral spells, why not tell outsiders about our most sacred and venerable artifact.” He sighed deeply and continued, voice taking on what Tristan privately thought of as his ‘professor voice’, the same one he used when lecturing Tristan during magic lessons. “No one knows how old the Spirit Fountain is, we don’t have records that go that far back- but we know it’s been around as long as Mria Yansi has. Some myths say it was a gift from the fae, others that it sprouted from the earth when the first mages came here to settle, as an auspicious sign that the land was destined to become our home._

_“Either way, the well is connected to every citizen ever born within Mria Yansi’s walls. A week after birth, every child is taken into the well and some of the magic that flows out of it becomes a part of them. It forms a lifelong link between the infant and the fountain._

_“It’s not just a link of magic or energy or however you want to think about it, it’s also a link of knowledge._

_“That is Mria Yansi’s biggest secret, and part of why our mages are some of the strongest ever born- you gain inherent knowledge of magic. Things that would take an ordinary person weeks take us hours and so forth. Of course, this doesn’t mean everyone can do every spell ever crafted. Knowledge isn’t execution, and it isn’t like the fountain provides detailed instructions, rather just a feeling or an instinct on how to do things. That’s why you’ve struggled with learning even the first spell our mages learn, Tristan. You’re starting from scratch while I, and every mage who’s ever lived here, has known instinctively how to do certain things nearly from birth._

_“But, since every person born here is linked, even non-mages, it means they’d be able to find me in a heartbeat. So I have to sever my link. Which, if I’m right, would cripple the entire thing. Links aren’t meant to be broken. Except in death.”_

_With a slow creeping sort of horror, Tristan asked, “Aster, what would happen to everyone here?”_

_Aster bit his lip and closed his eyes wearily. “I’m not certain,” he admitted. “I expect people wouldn’t have access to the shared knowledge. They’d forget, or struggle with spells they’d used to be able to do easily. Everyday functions, like food production and sanitation would likely be affected.”_

_“Would anyone die?” Tristan asked, dread mounting. How could he trade the lives for one group of people for another? Because in the end, the people of Mria Yansi were only guilty of ignorance, which was hardly their fault. They didn’t deserve to die for it._

_Thankfully, Aster shook his head, but he didn’t seem much relieved by this admission. “No, not directly from my actions. But healers would be less capable. More importantly, with the barrier gone, our enemies would likely target us the moment they were able to find the city. People will get hurt, maybe die, due to my actions”_

_“Who cares?” the stranger snapped, startling both Tristan and Aster, who’d both nearly forgotten about him. “This place is built on the suffering and death of countless unwilling victims. Anyone who’s hurt by us stopping that deserves it.”_

_“There are children here,” Aster snapped, an angry flush blooming high on his cheeks. “They haven’t done anything wrong. Outside the Rex’s office, no one knows about what the barrier spell is founded on. There are innocent people that will be affected, don’t act like that’s nothing!”_

_The man seemed startled by Aster’s outburst, rocking back a step. His expression remained resolved into determination, but there was something a little softer about his voice. “My brother is a child. He was taken right out of my village in the middle of the day. He’s innocent too.”_

_“The city won’t be entirely without allies,” Tristan said, mind racing. Both the stranger and Aster shot him confused looks. “The Durand Family and Mria Yansi will figure out pretty quickly that the two of us were the ones to sabotage everything. They’re old allies, I bet they’ll pool their resources to hunt us down. To do that, the Durand Family will have to help protect the city, at least somewhat. That also leaves us with some powerful enemies working together against us, if we pull this off.”_

_“You’re certain you can destroy the barrier?” the man asked Aster sharply._

_“I’m positive,” Aster said. “I’m the only one who’s studied it in depth.”_

_“Then I suggest we make a deal,” the man said. He holstered his gun, his posture becoming less outwardly hostile as he came further into the room, though Tristan knew better than to think that he was any less dangerous._

_“What kind of deal?” Tristan asked cautiously. He knew firsthand how double edged deals were when they were made by people who’d been taken in by the Durand Family._

_“You destroy the barrier, you make sure it can’t ever be made again and that no one can track you through the fountain, and help me rescue my brother, and in return I’ll set up everything you’ll need to stay out of Mria Yansi and the Durand Family’s reach once you’ve left the city. False identities, safe houses, money, contacts. Whatever you need.”_

_Tristan frowned, hesitating. It all sounded almost a little too good to be true. What the man was offering were all things Tristan had worried about, but had been unable to do anything about, given how cut off from the world he was in Mria Yansi. It would be perfect if this man could just hand over these vital missing pieces to their plans, for the price of doing what they’d planned on doing. It just seemed too neat and tidy. But what other angle could the man possibly have?_

_“Tell me about your brother,” Tristan said at last._

_Both Aster and the stranger frowned at him in confusion, but the stranger nodded after a pause and said, voice softening, “His name is Jamie. He just turned ten last week. His favourite class was math; I always used to tease him about being a baby nerd with a calculator for a brain. He’s afraid of frogs and the dark. I was supposed to be looking after him when they came and took him, but I was goofing off. I didn’t know he was missing for hours.” The man fell silent, his face still under strict control, but Tristan knew a man being strangled by grief when he saw one._

_He exchanged a sidelong look with Aster, who nodded decisively._

_“We accept your offer,” Aster said._

_“Let’s go ruin some ancient spells then,” Tristan said with an ironic smile tugging at his lips._

_~_

“And then what happened?” I demanded, eyes riveted to Tristan’s handsome face. He was an excellent storyteller, and much better about giving me the damn information I needed than Ross. In Ross’s defense, he didn’t know a lot of it, but that didn’t stop the barrage of information I was receiving from being _immensely_ satisfying.

Tristan smiled, looking exhausted. A small part of me felt a little guilty at pushing for more- the man had been talking for ages and looked exhausted and worn down and in dire need of rest. The greater part of me just couldn’t rest until I knew _everything_.

“There’s not much more to say,” Tristan replied, shrugging slightly. “I stole the spellbooks and gave them to Ross to smuggle out of the city, which was pretty anticlimactic. The Rex trusted you pretty well by that point and wasn’t keeping as strict an eye on how long you used them, like she had in the beginning. It was easy to take them without anyone noticing. The next day the three of us went down to the cells and broke the prisoners out. You started ripping the barrier spell apart and Ross and I hustled everyone out of the city, using the sewers, if you can believe it.”

“Gross,” I said, wrinkling my nose.

“Very,” Tristan agreed.

“What about the well thing?”

“Ross and I got everyone out easy enough,” Tristan explained. “Everyone important in the city was scrambling around like chickens with their heads cut off because they didn’t know what was happening or what to do. Once everyone was out, I took over pulling the barrier spell apart and you went to the well.”

“And I broke it?” I guessed. It was pretty obvious that I must have- the pair of us wouldn’t be alive if I hadn’t.

“You never told me what happened there,” Tristan replied, expression going a bit somber. “All I know is that the Rex went after you there, but it was too late for her to stop you. Somehow you got away from her and all of us got the hell out of the city.”

I nodded, chewing on my bottom lip absently. It seemed almost too... neat, after everything that had happened, for things to have happened like that. But this was my life, not a story. Sometimes that was just how life went.

“Any more questions?” Tristan asked, even as he gave a jaw-crackingly large yawn, his eyes heavy lidded.

“Just one,” I said and hesitated. Tristan nodded encouragingly, and I asked, all in a rush, “What was with those letters- the darlings and the whole thing. It was very...” I hesitated, not wanting to insult him. The letters were lovely and romantic, but also nothing like something I’d expect a former gang member to write while on the run.

Tristan burst into laughter, his shoulders shaking and he nearly fell over. “I forgot you don’t remember. That must have been weird to read. English is my second language, I learned it once I joined the Durand Family since my boss thought it was important. They hired this old laundry lady to teach me at night, but the only books she could get her hands on were these old, terrible romance novels. When I was first learning, I sounded like I was a character out of those books, until I became more fluent. But I still have some weird habits when it comes to writing.”

I snickered and said, completely honest, “That’s adorable.”

Tristan smiled, sweet and a little longing. “You used to make fun of me all the time about my writing, so I’d exaggerate it even more to make you laugh,” he said, laughing. “I’m pretty sure you liked it, which is why I kept doing it even after I learned more English.”

“I can’t speak for past-me, but I liked it,” I said, feeling my face go a little red. Was I flirting? I totally was, wasn’t I? Was that okay, or was it creepy? The man had once been my lover, but I didn’t remember it. For all intents and purposes, we were complete strangers to each other.

Luckily, Tristan didn’t seem offended, just smiled a warm smile that made me feel like I’d been wrapped in a warm blanket. “I’m glad,” he was all he said, and then yawned widely again. I leant over the edge of the bed and grabbed the gross looking drinks Amahle had left us. It tasted even worse than it looked, but within seconds I could feel myself growing sleepier. Tristan hardly looked like he needed his: he got through half of his glass before he set it aside and lay down, eyes almost sliding fully shut.

“You should get some rest,” I said, and made to scoot off the bed.

“Don’t,” Tristan said. He reached out to me with one hand before he stopped himself, his fingertips just barely grazing my wrist.

“Do you need anything?” I asked. The bags under his eyes were so dark that they looked like twin bruises. He looked so worn out and scared that it made my heart hurt.

“Stay?” he asked, eyes almost closed and voice slurred with sleep. “Just for a little while. I kept dreaming you were with me, and then you weren’t. When I was with the Durands. Stay for a little bit? Please.”

I nodded and carefully lay down beside him, body protesting the whole while. The bed was fairly narrow, not allowing for much space between us. It was a little weird, but not uncomfortably so. Tristan finally let his eyes close and let out a tiny, relieved sigh.

We were both asleep between one breath and the next, perfectly in sync.

~

I woke up what had to be only maybe two hours later, still feeling like death, but also like I seriously had to piss. My body felt like I was a hundred years old when I crawled to my feet and shuffled out of the room to do my business.

When I returned, I was about to lay back down on the floor to sleep some more, when a corner of a plastic bag under the bed Tristan was laying on caught my attention.

My things! I’d all but lost track of all of them since I’d been brought to Amahle’s what seemed like weeks ago, but had only been mere days. Somehow, the sight of the plastic bag reminded me of the sparkly pink cell phone I’d bought. And Opal and Foster.

Shit.

I hadn’t texted them since before I met Ross- which had been a week ago? It was hard to keep track of days given how much of my time I’d spent asleep and healing. They had to be freaking out with my unanswered messages. Worse, they might have gone to my ruined apartment. What if they’d called the police? The last thing I wanted was for them to get tangled up in the Durand’s nonsense.

I dug through the bags until I found my phone. Miraculously, it still had a little battery life left in it, and I scrolled to my missed calls.

I had three from Opal and one from Foster, though there were no voice messages. But I did have several texts from both of them.

The first few were from Opal asking me how I was doing, followed by an offer to make me dinner. After that, she grew worried and Foster then also texted me, concerned.

Then there were the three messages that turned my blood to ice. They were all from two days after I’d been attacked by Nguyen.

There was one each from Opal and Foster.

To: Simon Jones

From: Opal the nurse!

Simon, Foster and I are coming to your apartment. You haven’t been answering our messages and we’re both getting worried.

 

To: Simon Jones

From: Foster

JFC kid, what happened to your apartment?!? Are you okay?? We’re calling the police.

 

The third was from a number I’d never gotten a message from.

 

To: Simon Jones:

From: UNKNOWN NUMBER

It’s cute how you thought making a few little friends was a good idea, darling. If you don’t want me to make what I did to you look like a walk in the park, you’ll call me back. <3 -N

 

I sat back, panic rising in me so strongly it made it hard to breathe. The phone fell from my numb fingers.

Opal and Foster were in the hands of the psychopath who'd tortured me. And it was all my fault.

 


	13. Chapter 13

I made it all the way to the front door, legs wobbling under me like a newborn deer’s, before my brain caught up to my body.

Where was I going? Back to my old apartment to hunt down Nyguyen and Alvarez, without any clue as to where they were now? Yeah, that wasn’t a stupid idea or anything. That would totally work out for me.

I sank down on my heels, heart still pounding double time, adrenaline rushing through my veins. A fight-or-flight response only worked when there was something to flee from or somewhere to go. I had neither. All I had was a phone.

It sat in the palm of my hand, almost comically innocent looking with its bright pink case. I could call right then, demand Nguyen tell me where Foster and Opal were and threaten to storm his castle and rip him limb from limb, as every part of me was demanding.

The only problem was that at the moment, I was about at threatening as a kitten. My arms ached when I so much as tried to lift them above shoulder-height. Calling Nguyen would solve literally nothing, and he and Alvarez would probably find a way to twist the call against me.

Ross would know what to do. He’d be able to come up with a plan that wasn’t made out of stupid. Ross, who was still unconscious in Amahle’s bed. Ross, who had nearly died.

I’d have to wait for him to wake up. The idea of waiting made me want to rip my hair out, every second seeming to doom my friends further. But the text was a few days old and, for all I knew, Nguyen had already killed them both, reveling in the pain and the gore like he had with me. Realistically, waiting a few hours wouldn’t change anything. That didn’t stop it from being torturous.

I crept into the kitchen to make tea and then blinked and found myself sitting on the floor in Amahle’s spare room. There was a half empty mug of cooling tea in my hands. Right, clearly I was in prime condition to go rushing off to rescue my friends. Stupid. I was so stupid, so selfish. How could I have forgotten about Opal and Foster?

I curled into a ball of self-hatred and despair, and, despite myself, I fell asleep again. I had strange, indistinct dreams that didn’t seem to have a beginning or an end, but all involved Nguyen sitting on my chest while he gently trailed bloody fingers across my cheeks. Somehow, with logic that only belonged in a dream, I knew it was Opal’s blood.

I woke with an abrupt start, spilling the rest of my tea all across my lap. Ross was crouched in front of me and he jerked back, one hand raised, his face pale and drawn.

“Dassa’s tits, I just thought you’d be more comfortable laying down,” he said and backed off, standing and shuffling away.

I blinked blearily at him, brain not fully back online yet, still tangled in confusing dreams. The light coming from the window was brighter and afternoon-warm. My back and neck ached from sleeping against the wall- I had to have been asleep for at least a couple hours. The bed across the room was rumpled but empty.

“He’s in the shower,” Ross explained when he noticed my gaze, ineffectually trying to mop up my spilled tea with a stray t-shirt. “Amahle realized she’d let a filthy man sleep on her sheets and pitched a very quiet fit once he was awake.”

“Should you be up?” I asked, because frankly, Ross looked like shit. Also, he’d been bleeding to death while I hauled him across half a forest fairly recently.

Ross rolled his eyes. “ _I’m_ not the one who nearly burnt himself out magically last night,” he said and tossed the wet shirt out into the hall.

“ _I’m_ not the one who was bleeding everywhere last night,” I countered and struggled to my feet. My skin still felt raw and uncomfortable, my joints popping with the smallest movement. My shoulders let me know that they sincerely did not appreciate me sleeping against a wall after all I’d done the night before. I barely held back a wince- Ross would probably force me to lay down if I showed any sign of being in pain.

“Amahle worked her magic, I barely have a scratch on me,” Ross said and, when I shot him a disbelieving look, turned and pulled his shirt up to show me the huge burn on his back that had all but taken him out the night before. The comet shaped burn had faded overnight into flakey angry looking skin, with only the larger top section still bandaged.  Ross was still covered in bruises, especially on his ribs from where the Durand thug had kicked him, but they looked days old, already yellow-brown on the edges. The twin scars on his chest were faded white with age, but looked shockingly bright in the sunlight and with the dark bruises for comparison.

“I had top surgery years ago,” Ross explained, when he caught me eyeing them curiously. “It’s how I fell in with the Durand’s originally. They gave me money for the surgery in exchange for a few little jobs, mostly intel gathering.” Absently, one of Ross’s hands crept up to rub at the Durand brand on his shoulder. He sighed and continued, “I had the choice to walk away after the jobs were done, and I was going to, but then Jamie was taken and I had to stick around so I could use their connections to find him.”

“Wait, you’re trans?” I asked.

Ross rolled his eyes, and said, “Yes, Aster, I’m trans. I would have thought you’d have noticed, given I’m like five feet tall, but it’s nice to know I pass so well. Or maybe you’re just oblivious.”

I was pretty sure it was the second one, but I wasn’t about to _agree_ with him on that. I bit my lip and then said, “Yeah, well, everyone looks short when you’re as tall as I am.”

Ross laughed, looking startled by the sound. “There is that. I’ve never felt as short as I have when I was around you and Tristan, giants that you both are.”

“Be grateful you can find pants that fit,” I said, eyeing my tea-soaked sweatpants. I wasn’t sure if I had any clean ones left- I might have to go back to wearing pants that were too short again. Ugh.

I moved to right the fallen mug and spotted my phone, abandoned on the floor. The sight of it jogged my memory. Opal. Foster.

“Ross,” I said, starting to shake with nerves. “I got a message from Nguyen.”

“What?!” Ross demanded, his face growing paler, freckles standing out starkly on his face. “When? Last night?” He looked like he wanted to grab me and shake me by the shoulders, but was also swaying on his feet, like the effort of staying upright was all he could manage.

“No- it was from the day you rescued me. I never thought to look at my phone until this morning,” I said.

This seemed to calm Ross down somewhat, his shoulders relaxing, a little colour coming back to his face. “Well. That’s not as terrible as I was expecting. What did he say- just being a sadistic asshole as usual?”

“No- well, yes. But that’s not what worries me. He has Opal and Foster- two of my friends from the city.”

“You made friends?” Ross asked, brow creasing. “What in Dassa’s name prompted you to do that? You know that any contact with anyone is dangerous.”

I just stared at him, waiting for him to realize what he was saying.

“Why would you put anyone at risk like- oh,” he said, stumbling to a halt, eyes going wide. “Amnesia. Right.”

“Right,” I said, crossing my arms.

“Sorry. I’m still a bit tired,” Ross said. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. He looked like shit, and I kind of terrible for immediately ambushing him with bad news the second he was out of bed, but I couldn’t just cool my heels while Alvarez and Nguyen had my friends.

“Okay,” he said after a long moment. “I am going to eat something and then Amahle and I are going to brainstorm a solution to this mess.”

“I want to help,” I insisted. I doubted I could be of much use, given my lack of memories, but I wasn’t about to let Ross order me back to bed to rest when _he_ was up and about.

“No, you’re going to take a shower before Amahle starts shouting at you about getting her sheets dirty,” Ross corrected.

“She’s awful protective of them,” I said, toeing the tangled pile of bedding on the floor where I’d slept. They were streaked in dirt, blood and leaves from our adventure in the woods, and I suspected that they were a write-off. I could kind of see where Amahle was coming from: that was probably the second set I’d ruined since Ross had brought me to her home.

“Between the three of us, she’s had to throw out a lot of linens over the years,” Ross agreed.

“I don’t know why I even put up with the filthy lot of you,” Amahle said as she passed by in the hallway.

“You know you love us!” Tristan shouted from inside the bathroom and Ross badly smothered a snort of amusement.

“Try that line again when you haven’t just ruined another set of my sheets!” Amahle shouted back and went into the kitchen to being banging around.

“I’ll buy you a new set!” Tristan said, followed by the sound of the bathroom door opening.

“With what money? I’m the only one of you lot that actually has a job!” Amahle retorted good-naturedly from the kitchen.

The whole scene made my heart ache in the happiest way- this house wasn’t meant to hold two people, much less four, but the sheer casual familiarity I felt at being here with these three... I could only imagine what it must have been like when I remembered them. Old Aster had better have appreciated how great his friends were, like I did.

Tristan came into the spare room, dripping and swaddled in several towels. “She does have a point,” Tristan said to Ross, grinning widely despite how wane and sickly he looked. “I should make you steal her some new ones.”

“You’re the one who had to go and get kidnapped,” Ross said flippantly. “You have to suffer the consequences.”

“Jerk,” Tristan said and punched Ross lightly on the shoulder.

Ross rolled his eyes again and reached up to flick Tristan on the ear. Because of the height difference, Ross had to stand on his toes to do it, making it all the more comical. “Don’t get kidnapped again,” Ross told him sternly and then left the spare room.

“I’ll do my best!” Tristan called after him.

That left me alone with Tristan, who was fresh from his shower. God himself could not have stopped me from staring. Tristan was clearly still suffering from his imprisonment, being too thin and his skin being obviously too pale even under his natural tan, but nothing could diminish his natural good looks. He had very nice, broad shoulders, and there was something about the slant of his hips.

Tristan noticed my blatant staring and went from startled to pleased in less than a second and waggled his eyebrows at me. “Your turn,” he said with a sly grin.

“Sorry” I blurted, clutching my clean set of clothing to my chest harder and darted away before Tristan could reply, my face beet red. What was I doing? The man still saw me as his old lover, who was mostly not me, and he’d only just been rescued the night before. Clearly this meant it was the perfect time to ogle his worn-down frame. I was such a creep.

Showering was pretty uncomfortable, given how raw my skin was, the burned bands painfully sensitive to hot water, but I felt much better once I was clean and wearing fresh clothing- with jeans that fit, thank god. I twisted my hair up into a half-assed bun, my shoulders too sore to hold my arms up long enough to braid it back properly, and I wandered into the kitchen.

Amahle and Ross were sitting at the table while Tristan was cooking something that smelled mouthwatering at the stove.

“We need to consider how much knowledge the Durands gained from interrogating Tristan,” Ross said, voice carefully neutral, but I saw Tristan flinch faintly nonetheless.

“Well, all of your old aliases are done,” Amahle said, jotting something down on a pad of paper.

“And most of your safehouses,” Tristan added. He stirred whatever was on the stove jerkily and added, “Though, I’m pretty sure they were all ones they had already found.”

“I have a few aliases that Tristan didn’t know about, so put that down as an asset,” Ross told Amahle and then spotted me standing in the doorway. “Aster, come sit down. We’re planning our next steps.”

On the table, along with a steaming pot of tea, were several maps, a couple of sheets of paper covered in incomprehensible scribbles, and the pad of paper Amahle was writing on. It was divided into two columns, assets and liabilities. The ‘assets’ column was the shorter of the two.

“So, what have you decided so far?” I asked, unable to keep from shooting a glance at Tristan’s tense shoulders hunched over the stove.

“We’re still figuring out what we have to work with,” Amahle explained, tapping her pen on the assets column. “Which so far is my home, your magic, Tristan’s magic, once he’s stable enough to use it, and some of Ross’s remaining contacts.”

“Which have been dwindling ever since we became Mria Yansi’s number one enemies,” Ross said with a weary sigh. “I still have a few friends within the Durand Family, but they’re difficult to contact, and can’t do much for us without drawing unwanted attention.”

“Wait,” I said, my hand freezing on the teapot I’d been about to pick up. “Play that by me again: you are _friends_ with people in the Durand Family?” My heartbeat started to pick up the pace, adrenaline starting to race through my veins. Just thinking about the Durands brought to mind Nguyen’s dementedly cheerful grin and the disgusted sneer of the Durand thug in the woods the previous night. It had been bad enough that Ross had said he’d once been part of them, but he’d said he’d defected. How could he have anything to do with them when they were capable of such violence? When one of them had nearly succeeded in killing us the day before?

“Aster, calm down,” Tristan said, suddenly standing behind my chair. His hands gripped my shoulders and I belatedly realized I was gasping shallowly for breath, my vision going gray from panic. “Come on, deep breaths, you’re safe here. Focus on the wards of Amahle’s house. They feel strong, right? Nothing can get to us in here.”

I closed my eyes and tried to do what Tristan said, my mind reaching out to feel the magic in the house. It almost felt like I was somehow stretching a sore muscle to do so, but it was easy enough to do. The magic was concentrated outside the walls, in a dome-like shape and felt _green_ , somehow, like a forest of vines were woven together around the house. Nothing unwelcome could get through.

When I opened my eyes again, I felt much calmer. We were safe here. I slumped back in my seat, feeling like I’d just run a race.

“Try to avoid doing that, while you’re recovering from pushing yourself too far yesterday,” Amahle said, expression pinched.

“He wasn’t going to calm down any other way,” Tristan said, voice curt. “You both have been pretty bad at explaining our current situation to Aster. If you had, he wouldn’t have panicked.”

“Tristan, I get that you’re worried, but we’ve been doing the best we can-” Amahle started to say placatingly.

“No, you haven’t!” Tristan snapped, startling me when his hands abruptly gripped my shoulders tightly. “You both keep forgetting that this isn’t the Aster you both remember. I had to explain a hell of a lot to him this morning that I shouldn’t have needed to, given how long he’s been with the pair of you. Sure, some of it was things neither of you were around for, but he didn’t even really know _why_ Mria Yansi want to kill him! That’s inexcusable!”

Both Amahle and Ross looked rather ashen at Tristan’s words, neither saying a word when he fell silent.

I twisted in my chair to look at him, dislodging his hands in the process. “Look, things have been kind of busy. I know they didn’t intentionally keep me in the dark about stuff. I was just a bit... surprised to hear that Ross still talks to some of the people trying to kill us.”

“Being busy is not an excuse,” Tristan said tightly, but his expression softened a little. “Ever since we’ve been on our run, our lives have almost always been like this. They should have made time. What you have to understand, Aster, is that I’ve also had experience with memory loss. You make stupid decisions when you don’t know all the details.” When he said this, he shot a look at Ross, who paled further and winced slightly.

“You’re right,” Ross said, voice tight. “I guess, in part, it felt like if I didn’t fully explain things, you’d remember it all on your own. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said, ignoring how this made Tristan frown at me. “But you seriously need to explain why you have any contact with the people who nearly killed me last night and tortured Tristan.”

Ross nodded quickly and steepled his fingers below his chin, seeming to try and gather his thoughts. After a long moment, he said, “The Durand Family is less... monolithic than you might be thinking. It’s a global organization which technically has a single boss in charge of all of it. But in reality, there are hundreds of chapters, each with its own leader. Each chapter is influenced heavily by its leader. The chapter that I joined is rather lax compared to others. Technically no one is allowed to leave the Durand Family once they’ve joined, but the chapter I joined allowed for its members to ‘retire’ and essentially return to their regular lives.”

“The chapter I joined was much stricter and was known for being especially bloodthirsty, for comparison. They would never have let anyone leave like Ross’s does,” Tristan added and finally sat down at the remaining chair next to Ross.

“Exactly,” Ross said with a nod. “Technically speaking, the entire Durand Family is under orders to capture us and deliver us to Mria Yansi, but how hard they try to follow those orders varies a great deal.”

“My chapter, usually called Kang’s lot, since that’s the guy who’s been in charge for the last twenty years, took it as a personal insult when I defected,” Tristan explained, a wry smile tugging at his mouth. “Because of that, a lot of the thugs we’ve run into over the years have been from that chapter, even though their territory is pretty far away from here.”

“Nguyen and Alvarez are from a different chapter, a local one called the Brewmakers since they control most of the apothecary trade in this area. Their chapter isn’t as dangerous as Kang’s lot, but a lot of them are experts on tracking, which meant we’ve run into them frequently. Nguyen is one of their senior officers, and he nearly caught you on your own two years ago.” Ross hesitated, and then continued carefully, “You nearly cut off his arm when you escaped, and he was beaten and demoted for letting you get away. That’s why he has such a personal grudge against you.”

“I- I nearly cut his arm off?” I asked, my voice sounding faint even to my own ears.

“This is a one-sided war we’re in, Aster,” Tristan said. His expression was sad as he continued, “And one that will probably kill us all eventually. We’re up against impossible odds, we can’t afford to hold back at all. It was a miracle that you managed to get away from Nguyen that time. He chased you across half a city, even while heavily injured, and he nearly caught you. If I hadn’t made it back to get you, he probably would have succeeded in capturing you. And given how angry he was, I’m not sure he would have followed orders to take you to his boss, he might have just executed you on the spot.”

I bit my lip and nodded silently, even as my gut churned. I’d known this whole thing was dangerous, but this conversation was really hammering that home in a new way. I couldn’t even imagine being in so much danger that cutting off a man’s arm was simply a small part of my escape. It terrified me, and only made me worry more about Foster and Opal.

“Anyways, my contacts within the Durand Family are mostly from my old chapter, the Riverside Dogs. They’ve been passing me information since even before you destroyed the barrier spell in Mria Yansi. It’s been critical in helping us keep one step ahead of the Brewmakers and Kang’s lot, but more and more of my contacts have been under scrutiny with every escape we’ve had.” He sighed deeply and said, “I only have a few left, and if we go after your friends, I’m pretty sure the last of them will have to fall out of contact with me or risk being found out. And the penalty for what they’ve been doing for us is almost certainly death.”

“Which would mean our deaths, since we’d lose our ability to stay ahead of the game,” Tristan added.

“So, in short, we’re all screwed,” Amahle said with a laugh she clearly didn’t feel.

“Not you,” Ross said. “Your identity and location are shielded in all of our memories, so the Durand Family wouldn’t have gotten that from Tristan’s mind.”

“I’m not letting the three of you go off to get killed on your own while I’m safe and protected like a princess in a tower!” Amahle snapped and leapt to her feet, her dark eyes flashing dangerously.

“And I’m not letting you get killed pointlessly,” Ross growled, his expression uncompromising.

“How about... we focus on a plan that involves none of us dying,” Tristan suggested, ignoring the dual glares this garnered him. “I’m just saying, we aren’t dead yet, so let’s try and plan to keep it that way.”

Neither Amahle nor Ross seemed terribly appeased by his words, but Amahle dutifully sat back down, the pair of them still shooting each other dark looks.

“Most of our assets at this point boil down to our individual skills and the money we have left, along with anything Ross had that I didn’t know about,” Tristan continued, like he and Ross hadn’t just implied that planning a rescue would almost certainly mean our deaths.

Before I could think, I blurted, “Are you all really okay with doing this?” When they all stared at me in confusion, I continued, still babbling like an idiot, “I mean, it’s my fault that Nguyen took Foster and Opal. You shouldn’t have to suffer because I made a stupid decision.” I bit off the rest of what I wanted to say and ducked my chin in to stare at my knees, my chest aching. I was the reason Foster and Opal were in danger. That was hard enough, heart wrenching enough, all on its own. I couldn’t handle being responsible for the deaths of my remaining friends.

“You couldn’t have known what would happen,” Tristan said, voice achingly gentle. I clenched my jaw against the sob trying to make its way out of my throat, tears pricking at the corner of my eyes. “You were scared and alone, of course you’d make friends.”

“Bu if I hadn’t, they wouldn’t be in danger!” I snapped, looking up sharply. Tristan looked taken aback, at a loss for words, but Ross wasn’t, his expression growing sharper.

“If you hadn’t made friends with those women, Nguyen would have found another way to hurt you,” Ross said bluntly, leaving no room for pity in his voice. “Losing you a second time has pushed him beyond any sense of restraint. If not these people, he would have threatened your parents, or someone else you care about. He knows you’re more... open to psychological attacks with your memory missing, and he was going to take advantage of that regardless. So, stop wasting our time by blaming yourself and try and help us make a plan.”

“Ross!” Tristan hissed, but I wasn’t offended. Ross had told me exactly what I needed to hear- not an absolution of my actions or my guilt, but instructions on what I could do to fix it.

“You’ll probably have to take my magical ability off the ‘assets’ column,” I said musingly, looking over Amahle’s list. “I barely know how to do anything, right now.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Amahle said and gently picked up my forearm and gently tapped one of the bands of irritated skin there. “I’m guessing you subconsciously remember more than you think, given what you were able to do last night.”

“What even _was_ that?” I asked, also eyeing the strange bands of angry skin. They hurt much less than they had when I’d first woken up that morning, but my skin still was brightly banded. I hoped it wasn’t permanent, I had enough weird accidental magical tattoos after what had happened with the protection spell.

“It was a high magic technique,” Tristan explained. “A sort of last resort, cache-all spell. You basically pull all of the magic out of your core and will it to do whatever you need it to do. It’s incredibly powerful and can be used in any way you can think of, as you probably saw last night, but it’s exceptionally dangerous. You can easily burn yourself out, since magic belongs in your core for a reason. More importantly, using it like that can easily kill you, either from a lack of control while using that much magic all at once, or by draining you dry.”

“So, in short, don’t do that again,” Amahle translated when I just blinked dumbly at Tristan’s stern expression.

“I am honestly not sure _how_ I did that,” I admitted, but added for Tristan’s sake, “But I’ll try not to do it again.”

“You being able to do that probably has to do with the spirit fountain,” Tristan said. “Since you learned a lot of high magic subconsciously, I expect you know how to do a lot of it, even with your memories of learning it all removed.”

“Which would explain what you said when we made your fake dragon’s eye,” Amahle added thoughtfully.

“It’s still not something we should rely on. It might be safer if we leave Aster here with Amahle while all of this is happening,” Ross said firmly. Somehow, he managed to agree with me while still pissing me off a little, which kind of summed Ross up in a single sentence. I didn’t want anyone counting on me for things I couldn’t follow through on, but I wasn’t about to let Ross, who was still weak and worn looking, march out the door to fix _my_ mistake.

“And when exactly did we agree to leave Amahle here?” Amahle demanded sharply.

“You stayed behind when we went to get Tristan, the situation now is essentially the same,” Ross said very calmly, which only served to rile Amahle up further.

“Oh no it isn’t. I only agreed to stay behind because we didn’t have time to make a plan that would allow for all of us to go,” Amahle said hotly. Her hands clenched into fists on the table as she ground out, “I am not letting you waltz right back into harm’s way without me again, Ross.”

“That isn’t your decision.” Once again Ross grew colder, his voice dangerously flat, even as Amahle’s temper burned brighter behind her dark eyes.

“The hell it isn’t!” Amahle slammed her hands onto the table, making the teapot rattle loudly. Tristan and I both jumped, but Ross didn’t even flinch, still coolly meeting Amahle’s gaze. His lack of reaction seemed to only piss Amahle off further, as she snarled, “It’s my life! I get to decide what I do in it, not you!”

“This isn’t your fight,” Ross said calmly, his green eyes glinting frostily.

Amahle snorted bitterly. “Right, of course it isn’t. Well, Ross, I hate to tell you, but you _made_ it my fight every time you turned up at my door asking for my help.” She got to her feet and stormed out of the kitchen, then paused in the doorway and added over her shoulder, “Also? Fuck you, Ross.”

The kitchen was silent, the sound of Amahle stomping out of the house into her garden made all the more obvious with the three of us not speaking.

After a long moment where we all listened to the faint sound of Amahle swearing passionately outside, Tristan said, very casually, “Ross, buddy, you seriously fucked up here.”

Ross’s mouth thinned, and the first hint of rage entered his eyes as he snapped back, “It’s bad enough the three of us are dead men walking. Amahle didn’t sign up for any of this. She wasn’t in the city when we all decided saving those people was worth more than our lives.”

“No,” Tristan agreed placidly. “But she did sign up for it every time she let us come here. She could have turned us away the moment we told her why we needed her help. She isn’t stupid, Ross. She knew what helping us meant.”

Ross held Tristan’s impossibly calm gaze for a long, tense moment, before all the will seemed to run out of him. He slumped forward, elbows on the table, face buried in his hands. “She has a family, a job, a life,” he said, his voice sounding impossibly small. “I didn’t ask her to give that all up for m- for us.”

Tristan smiled sadly and replied, “She wouldn’t be Amahle if we had to ask.” He eyed the kitchen window and tilted his head slightly, considering the sound of Amahle’s continued swearing. “I’ll go talk to her, give her someone to yell at so she can calm down a bit.” He paused and grabbed Ross by the hair, forcing him to meet his gaze, his expression dead serious. “But the second she’s calmed down, you are acting like a rational adult _who is her friend_ and talking to her. Got it?”

Wordlessly, Ross nodded and Tristan nodded back, satisfied. He got up and left the kitchen, heading out into the late afternoon sun. A moment later, Amahle started shouting again. From the sound of it, she was displeased to see Tristan not only out of bed, but out of the safety of the house.

Ross sighed deeply, rubbed a hand across his face and pulled Amahle’s list closer to him.

After an awkwardly long silence, I said, “I think I might have something to add to the ‘asset’ list.”

Ross looked up, still looking like he was recovering from the rather intense argument. “What is it?”

“Well, thinking of Foster and Opal got me thinking about all that happened before I met you- I have a ridiculous amount of money in my bank account, if that’s helpful. But more importantly, maybe we could call Officer Nikolaidis?”

Ross’s eyebrows shot up. “We do know he isn’t Durand Family, given he had plenty of time to haul you in, but what do you think he could do to help us?”

“Well, technically the Durand family is a mob group, right? So even if they have people on the police force, I’m guessing that they can’t completely stop the police from investigating them. Maybe he could dig us up some information,” I explained.

Ross nodded, expression sharpening thoughtfully as he said, “More importantly, Foster and Opal aren’t on the run, or on Mria Yansi’s hit list. Them going missing will be noticed by their families and their friends. They will most certainly have been reported missing. If Nikolaidis can give us information about their missing persons report, we might be able to figure out where they were taken,” Ross added, the last of the stress leaving his expression as his mind raced through the possibilities. “It wouldn’t be as good as my contacts within the family, but it’s not nothing. Thank you, Aster, I would never have thought of that- I’m too used to being on the outside of normal society after either being on the run or being part of the Durand Family.”

“It’s no big deal,” I said and shrugged. I paused and then added, “Do you smell something burning?”

Ross swore and ran over to the stove. “Burnt, again,” he said, poking whatever was in the pot with a wooden spoon. “This is the third time Tristan’s tried to make this for us. I swear this recipe is cursed.”

I followed him over, peeking over his shoulder at the pot on the stove. It smelled pleasantly spicy and rich under the burnt smell.

“Hey, Ross, can I ask you something?” I asked carefully, as Ross tried to see if he could save whatever Tristan had been making.

Ross grunted in agreement.

“You and Amahle... Are you two...?” I couldn’t finish the question, mostly because I wasn’t entirely sure what I was asking. There was some unspoken _thing_ between the two of them, which had been obvious since the moment I’d seen them together.

“It’s nothing,” Ross said, is voice tight. He didn’t sound angry, though. More like he was full of regret, or even a bit wistful. Definitely sad to say the least.

“Are you sure?” I asked doubtfully. That was a whole lot of _something_ to be nothing.

“My decisions in life already put one person I care about in danger I couldn’t protect him from,” Ross said, voice very soft.

Jamie, his little brother, who we’d rescued, but who had come close to being killed.

“I’m not going to make the same mistake twice” Ross added.

“Even if she’s already in danger anyways?” I asked, because the situation between Ross and Amahle was markedly different than the one surrounding Jamie. Amahle was an adult, one who could protect herself. As Tristan had said, she knew what she was getting in to.

“I’m not going to make the same mistake twice,” Ross repeated, still staring down at the bubbling pot like it held the answers to all of his questions.

“What happened with Jamie wasn’t your fault, you couldn’t have known he’d be taken,” I protested, because it was the truth.

Ross didn’t reply for a long moment, and finally said, “I think this is salvageable, go see if Amahle is done shouting at Tristan and we can all have an early dinner.”

I wanted to throw my hands in the air in exasperation. Fucking Ross and his feelings.

Instead I grumbled, “fine,” and stomped outside, feeling impossibly frustrated. Congratulations, Ross, you’ve successfully annoyed all three of your friends in the span of half an hour! Your prize is our eternal irritation!

Tristan and Amahle were sitting on the plastic chairs where Amahle had first shown me how to sense magic. It was almost impossible to think that hadn’t even been a week ago.

Tristan took one look at my face and laughed. “Ross?” he asked, gesturing for me to sit on the remaining chair.

“One day he is going to explode from repressing all of those feelings he doesn’t have, and I am going to _laugh_ ,” I grumbled and sat down with a thump.

“Ah, you tried to convince him being a human instead of a very convincing robot was okay,” Tristan said knowingly. “A conversation many of us have failed at having with him.”

“Ross has feelings,” Amahle said quietly. She had lost all of her anger from the kitchen, and just looked tired. She might not have snuck into a Durand Family base, or been held captive by them, but, I realized with a pang of guilt, she’d been dealing with just as much shit as we had. She’d spent hours waiting for all of us, unable to know if we’d been successful, or if we were even all still alive.

Even worse, Ross had nearly died while she’d been healing him the night before. With both Tristan and I out of commission, she’d been all alone. I couldn’t imagine how scared she must have been, even while having to forge ahead anyways.

Part of me really wanted to go back inside to smack Ross. Not her fight, _my ass_.

“He feels a lot more deeply than a lot of people do, and it terrifies him,” Amahle continued, her gaze distant even as she looked out at the garden.

“I know that, we both do,” Tristan said, patting her on the knee. “But he’s such a child sometimes, it makes it hard to deal with him.”

“Friendship is never easy,” Amahle agreed and turned away from facing the garden, her eyes focusing back on the pair of us. “Anyways, Aster, did you come out here just to get a break from Ross or was there another reason?”

I blinked, and then remembered why I’d come outside. “Ross says we can probably eat the thing you were making, Tristan, even if it’s a little burnt.”

“Again? Damnit,” Tristan said, making an exasperated face as he stood.

Dinner was delicious, if tense, and was followed by Amahle ordering a grey-faced Ross to bed. It was very telling that he didn’t protest and meekly did as she said. Amahle left to run errands she’d been neglecting over the past days due to dealing with the constant flow of patients in her home, leaving Tristan and I alone. I was also feeling the consequences of the previous day, my shoulders screaming at the smallest movement, and I went to lie down for at least a short nap. Tristan curled on the bed with the stack of spellbooks and journals I’d found in my apartment.

“You should sleep too,” I said drowsily from the floor. The makeshift bed had no business being so comfortable, it felt like I could sink right through the floor to the earth below the house. In the back of my mind, I could feel the comforting rustle of the vine-wards surrounding the house, keeping us safe. It was incredibly soothing.

Tristan shook his head. “I’ll just have nightmares if I try to sleep before I’m completely exhausted.”

“Should have asked Amahle for one of her sleepy drink things,” I argued, my words starting to slur around the edges.

“Those knock you out, but don’t give you a very deep sleep,” Tristan replied, followed by the sound of rustling paper. At some point my heavy eyelids had drifted shut, and I had to fight to pry them back open.

“Go to sleep, Aster. You don’t have to worry about me,” Tristan said gently.

After struggling to keep my eyes open for another moment, I gave in and fell asleep.

~

Predictably, I had another terrible nightmare involving my bloody-mouthed twin. Because I’d gone over a week without one, and I was long overdue.

“This is your own fault, you know,” my twin said, patronizingly apologetic. He patted my hair like you did to a child or a dog, even as my own hands wrapped around his throat without my consent.

“You can’t kill the truth,” he said and started to laugh that awful, hysterical giggle that appeared in every dream I had of him. “You can’t change the past, you’ve never been good enough, and you’re going to kill all of them.”

“Shut up!” I screamed and jackknifed up out of my dream when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Aster?”

I blinked slowly, trying to comprehend the abrupt switch from my dream to reality. It was darker in the room, probably just after sunset. Tristan was crouching on the floor next to my bed, one hand outreached from where he’d touched my shoulder before I’d flinched away.

“Are you okay?” He asked worriedly, dark eyes wide.

“I’m fine,” I said, running a distracted hand through my hair only for it to immediately get stuck. It had fallen out of my shitty bun while I’d slept and had managed to get impossibly tangled.

“Yes, I could tell that from reaction you had to me waking you up,” Tristan said dryly. He sat back on his heels and let his hand fall to his side without touching me.

“Did I wake you up?” I asked. I had to imagine I’d been thrashing around, probably whining or sobbing in my sleep, which would have been disruptive in such a small room.

Tristan frowned, a small crease knitting his dark eyebrows together. “No, I wasn’t asleep yet,” he said, gesturing at the pile of books on the bed. “And you were totally silent. I only woke you up because I think I figured something out.”

“Figured what out?”

“I think I know how to get your memories back,” Tristan said and held up his cupped palm. “Using this.”

In his hand was the blood-red gemstone I’d found in my apartment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys I've gotten a couple reviews and PMs on multiple sites asking me to not abandon this story, so I just wanted to address all these messages so there's no confusion. I swear I am absolutely not abandoning this story, and I guarantee it will have a proper ending (eventually). Chapters are going to take much longer than they did when I first started last summer as I no longer have any buffer chapters, so updates are going to be less predictable or frequent. (For reference, when I posted chapter 1 I already had drafts all the way up to chapter 7 and an outline for chapter 8)  
> Thank you all for reading, and an especially huge thank you to anyone who's reviewed or commented, it really does help me stay motivated when I'm struggling with writer's block or trying to get through round 3 of editing. 90% of the time getting a review will make me immediately drop whatever I'm doing and open up my word document (The other 10% is when I'm doing annoying real life stuff like eating or sleeping or working. Ugh real life, always getting in the way).  
> Anyways, thank you for your patience, I'm hoping that I'll be able to pick up the pace now that summer is here and I'm healthy again!

**Author's Note:**

> Obvious title is obvious, but I couldn't resist and comes from the Pablo Neruda poem "Tonight I can write the saddest lines"


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